Issue 03: Jalapeño, Cheap Oak, and a Name Younger Than the Drink

Third issue. If you are new, the deal is four things every week: one cocktail, one brewing idea, one piece of history, one experiment. Onward.

I. One cocktail: the jalapeño añejo Old Fashioned

Two ounces of spirit, a quarter ounce of sweetener, two dashes of bitters, an orange twist: that is the Old Fashioned template, unchanged since it was just called "cocktail." This version splits the two ounces, a quarter ounce of jalapeño whiskey and one and three quarters ounces of a good añejo tequila, with a quarter ounce of agave syrup standing in for sugar and two dashes of Angostura. Stir over ice, strain over one big cube, express the orange peel over the top.

The ratio matters more than it looks like it should. The Scoville scale itself is measured by dilution: a pepper's rating comes from how many times it has to be cut with sugar water before a panel stops tasting any heat at all. Seven parts tequila to one part jalapeño whiskey keeps the pepper as a warm finish instead of the whole point of the drink. The añejo is quietly doing bourbon's job too, since a year or more in oak gives it the same vanilla and caramel character a barrel gives whiskey. Oak-aged spirit standing in for oak-aged spirit, just from a different plant.

II. One brewing idea: oak on a budget

A three-liter barrel ages fast because it has far more wood surface for every liter inside it than a full-size cask does. The same math works even smaller for anyone brewing beer who does not want to buy a barrel at all. Oak chips, cubes, and spirals dropped into a secondary fermenter get you real barrel character without one. Chips have the most surface area per ounce and work fastest, around half an ounce for a five-gallon imperial stout. Cubes and spirals take longer for the same effect, which is fine if slow and gentle is the goal. Soak them in bourbon or whiskey for a few days first, both to sanitize the wood and to load in a little extra flavor before the beer ever touches it. Taste along the way. Oak does not wait for anyone to be ready.

III. One piece of history: the name is younger than the drink

"Cocktail" got its first print definition in 1806, in a New York paper called The Balance and Columbian Repository: spirits, bitters, water, and sugar, a "bittered sling." That is already an Old Fashioned. The name came decades later, once 1860s bartenders started dressing cocktails up with curaçao, absinthe, and muddled fruit, and some drinkers started asking for the plain 1806 version back, "the old-fashioned way." The Chicago Daily Tribune was writing about "old fashioned cocktails" by 1880. A popular story credits Louisville's Pendennis Club with inventing the drink, but the club was not founded until 1881, a year after the Tribune was already using the name. Cocktail historian David Wondrich calls that origin story busted. Sometimes the more interesting history is that nothing new happened, people just asked for the original back.

IV. One Experiment: A Little Barrel, a Bottle of Tequila, and a Question

There are few things more satisfying than giving a good tool another job.

My little three-liter barrel had just finished aging its first spirit—Old Forester bourbon. Rather than letting the barrel sit empty, I filled it the very same day with three bottles of Tres Generaciones Blanco.

Not because I knew exactly what would happen.

Because I wanted to find out.

The Brewshed Institute isn't built around having all the answers. It's built around asking interesting questions, documenting what happens, and sharing both the successes and the surprises along the way.

This project is one of those questions.

Why Tequila?

Like a lot of people, my earliest experiences with tequila involved cheap bottles, salt, lime, and the sort of decisions that tend to become better stories than evenings.

That changed over the years thanks to my friend Benjamin.

I was talking about shots.

Benjamin was talking about agave, production methods, regional differences, and craftsmanship.

He approached tequila with a level of respect that was completely new to me, and somewhere along the way his curiosity became contagious.

Eventually I stopped thinking of tequila as simply something you drank and started appreciating it as something people dedicated their lives to creating.

That curiosity eventually found its way into the Brewshed.

So when it came time to choose a spirit for this barrel, Tres Generaciones felt like the right place to start.

In many ways, this experiment owes as much to friendship as it does to oak.

Why Such a Small Barrel?

Three-liter barrels have a reputation.

Some people love them.

Others avoid them entirely.

The criticism is fair. With so much wood in contact with such a small volume of spirit, everything happens quickly. Leave something in too long and the barrel can overwhelm the very character that made the spirit enjoyable in the first place.

But that's also what makes these barrels fascinating.

They don't hide mistakes.

They accelerate learning.

Instead of waiting years to understand what oak contributes, you can watch those changes unfold over weeks and months.

That makes them perfect for an experiment.

Not Every Experiment Ends Well

I've learned over the years that experimentation doesn't guarantee success.

Sometimes it guarantees a good story.

One of my favorite failures involved a simple ale that developed an off flavor. Rather than admit defeat, my cousin and I convinced ourselves we could rescue it by pushing the beer through a Randall packed full of dill pickles.

Somewhere around that moment, "this is either going to be brilliant or spectacularly stupid" should probably have crossed our minds.

It did not improve matters.

If anything, it confirmed that some ideas sound much better after a couple of beers than they do in the light of day.

Mikey and I laughed all the way through dumping the batch. The beer was a complete loss, but the story has aged far better than the ale ever would have.

That day reinforced something I still believe.

Failure isn't wasted if you're willing to learn from it.

It's even better if it leaves you with a story worth retelling.

The Brewshed Institute exists to document both.

This Isn't About Making Good Tequila Better

I'm not trying to improve Tres Generaciones.

It's already an excellent tequila.

What I'm trying to understand is what happens when a spirit with its own distinct personality spends time inside a small ex-bourbon barrel.

Does the oak complement the agave?

Does the bourbon leave behind something interesting?

Where's the point where complexity becomes too much?

I honestly don't know.

And that's the point.

If this experiment produces an incredible tequila, wonderful.

If it teaches me exactly why I shouldn't do it again, that's equally valuable.

What I Think Will Happen

I expect the first few weeks to bring familiar barrel notes.

A little vanilla.

Some caramel.

A touch of toasted oak left behind from the bourbon that previously occupied the barrel.

After that...

I'm not entirely sure.

The tequila already carries its own personality—pepper, citrus, cooked agave, minerality. Whether those qualities become richer or simply disappear beneath the oak is something we'll discover together.

More Than a Journal Entry

This isn't really a story about tequila.

It's a story about curiosity.

One of the ideas behind the Brewshed Institute is that knowledge doesn't appear fully formed.

It grows.

Every recipe, experiment, and project begins with a question.

Sometimes those questions become references that help other people.

Sometimes they become cautionary tales.

Sometimes they become family stories that get retold every time someone mentions dill pickles near a beer.

They're all worth preserving.

What's Next

This isn't a one-time article.

It's the beginning of a project.

Over the coming months I'll continue sampling the barrel, recording tasting notes, photographing the changes, and updating the permanent Barrel Aging Project in the Library.

Some updates may be exciting.

Some may simply confirm that patience is still required.

Either way, they'll become part of the record.

Thirty days from now we'll pull another sample.

Maybe the barrel will already be ahead of schedule.

Maybe it'll need another month.

Maybe I'll discover that putting tequila into a three-liter barrel wasn't such a crazy idea after all.

Whatever happens...

We'll write it down.

Because that's how we work.