Oak Chips for Wine and Whiskey

Get a European cask-aged touch in your drinks through French Oak chips. Add 1-4gm and wait for 2-4 weeks for the full flavor to develop. It is charred enough to release that much-coveted golden whole-bodied color and flavors. These are lightly toasted barrel chips, but you can toast them further to desirable darkness by keeping them in the OTG oven (180 Degree heat setting for 2 hours)

Oak chips inside a stainless steel conical fermenter is used in the industry extensively for full-bodied red wine (which is high in tannins and phenols), cask-aged beers, and whiskey production.

Dosage for Oak Chips

Unlike Oak Barrels, these are inexpensive and don’t harbor bacteria that can cause vinegar infection in your precious brew. Also, wooden barrels are prone to leaking and cracking which needs copious amounts of beeswax and carpentry to be usable. These use and throw chips (1gm per liter) is a perfect substitute.

Application

1. During alcoholic fermentation, adding new wood improves the tannin structure and stabilizes the color in red wines. The beer, wine, whisky gains almond and dried fruit aromas with no obtrusive woodiness.
2. These Oak Chips are Medium toasted and better added during aging to increase a porter, stout, whisky, rum, or wine’s aromatic complexity.
3. Soak the oak chips in boiling water/neutral spirit (vodka) for a few minutes to sterilize them before adding them to the fermenter.
4. Please note that the oak chips are lighter in weight and may float on top of the beer in the fermenter when added directly. We recommend adding oak chips into a clean and sterile nylon hop bag with something heavy and inert such as a glass marble(sterilized) so that the oak chips are soaked completely in the beer.

For more details on why chips are better than Oak barrels, please refer to the product comparison page. On the process please refer to this academic paper.

It can also be used to give the golden whiskey-like color/flavors to clear spirits (preferably 190 proof) that you purchased from a licensed liquor shop.