(Chico, CA) – If you follow BeerPulse closely, you may have seen a number of label approvals come through from Sierra Nevada Brewing for some barrel-aged beers. Some folks asked about them on Beer Advocate and Product Development Manager, Bill Manley, chimed in with some information. Below, see some of his (excerpted) answers.

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There won’t be any Barrel-aged Narwhal in large distribution. We made 15Bbls as a pilot batch and put that into bourbon barrels. It will be draught only, but probably limited to high-end festivals and such. Barrel-aged Dubbel and Quad are Chico-only releases in the bottle, and limited draught has made it outside of Chico and is out there now…Again VERY limited.

Barrel-Aged Bigfoot will be packaged in the next two weeks and we need to give it a month to bottle-condition (12.2 ABV!) so we’re looking for a late January release. Again, this is also super limited 100Bbls…some states are only getting a handful of cases so this one is definitely going to go really fast.

Most states will be getting some (depending on ABV caps…sorry Ohio) but most states will not be getting much.

There are multiple types of barrels. Mostly bourbon, some Tennessee Whisky, some rye and some single-malt scotch in the final to-market blend.

The bulk of our bourbon barrows are heaven Hill but we have Jim Beam brands in there too, as well as some Buffalo Trace as well. We’re promiscuous with barrels, typically we don’t do single-barrel bottlings due to the volume, but occasionally we’ll do one-off beers in single barrel… We did a Tripel in Pappy barrels a few years back.