A MudHen First: Barrel-Aged Beer

For the past year-ish, we’ve had some beer aging in bourbon barrels in the brewery.

And last Wednesday, we tapped one – 2019’s Yellow Flashing Lights.

It went into a bourbon barrel in December of 2019 and all during the year Tony and I bounced ideas of how we’d sell it when we were ready to debut this gorgeous beer. Would we bottle it before Christmas and sell it as an extremely limited run? Would we keg it? Months and months of trying to decide what we’d do with this robust imperial stout (and sneaking tastes here and there) finally culminated last week – we kegged it off. And dedicated exactly one keg to nitro.

If you haven’t tried the extremely, ultimate-limited run of our BBA YFL, you’d better hurry into the pub and grab a glass before it’s gone. We didn’t barrel-age any YFL this year, so this is literally one of a kind in terms of our brands and what we’ve made for in-house consumption. You won’t find our BBA YFL on shelves anywhere, either. Just here, at MudHen Brewing Company.

It wasn’t a complicated process to keg off the imperial stout. As with any other endeavor, we cleaned and sanitized hoses for our kegging process. We don’t have a bulldog – because this is the first time we’ve ever done something like this – so we opted instead to use a pump with a CO2 connection to get it from the barrel to the keg.

A simple-yet-effective process of pumping sanitizer through aforementioned lines to ensure they were beer-ready, removing the barrel bung (or plug), and then pumping beer into the line ensured we got as much BBA stout as we could out of that barrel. It yielded right around 46 gallons, which is about 3 kegs.

If you pass up on trying this BBA YFL, you’re missing out on a one-of-a-kind, ultra-limited, perfectly balanced brand. My advice? Stop in and have a glass as soon as you can.

I look forward to seeing you!

Cheers.