In 1999, homebrewer Tom Griffin stood in front of the Flossmoor Station booth at a small beer festival in Milwaukee and committed what he calls “a cardinal sin” after he tasted the barrel-aged Imperial Eclipse Stout that brewer Todd Ashman was pouring.

“I just stood there for an hour and a half and kept handing my glass back to him for a refill,” recalls Griffin. “It was like nothing I’d ever had before, a different flavor with every sip.” That was his first step down a long road which has helped transform craft brewing in America.

Flossmoor Station had won a Gold medal at the 1998 GABF for the beer that enamored Griffin and turned him into, in Ashman’s words, “the Johnny Appleseed of spirits barrels.” Ashman, now head brewer at FiftyFifty Brewing in Truckee, CA, was one of the barrel-aging pioneers. Sam Adams aged Triple Bock in Jack Daniels barrels in Ceres, CA, which were vintage dated 1994, and probably brewed in 1993 or earlier. Goose Island Bourbon County Stout, first brewed in 1994, won an Honorable Mention in the Strong Ale category at GABF 1995. Griffin suggests Ashman may have been the third brewer to employ the technique; Ashman himself says only that, “I started aging in wood in early 1997, so I’m definitely among the first 10-12 brewers who tried it. I like to think I’m the one who truly brought it to the masses since my beer inspired Tom to begin opening up channels for folks to get their own barrels.”

After 12 of the 15 brewers he asked at that festival said they’d be interested in barrel-aging if they could only get barrels, Griffin, who was working in the fermentation industry and had built a plant in Kentucky, “went home, got my 1975 motor home which I’d lived in while building that plant, ripped out the seats and refrigerator, then drove down  to see some distillers I’d gotten to know and filled it up with 40 whiskey barrels. I sold off most of them in Illinois to brewers I knew were interested on the way back. That was the beginning.”

He immediately made a second trip using both the motor home and a trailer. The next year he sold barrels in the same fashion for six weeks, then doubled that the following year, expanding his market to Minnesota and Michigan as well as Illinois and Wisconsin.

Around 2005, “Tom, the barrel guy” morphed into Griffin Barrels and he became a full-time entrepreneur. He still does much of the delivering personally these days, has customers all across the country and is holding his own against the major brokers. “I’m the tiniest big guy in the business,” he laughs. “I have a 1996 Dodge one-ton truck and a 28-footy long horse trailer which will hold about 70 barrels and it even has a hayloft where I can sleep if I want to. A lot of my customers have become good friends and they will often put me up in their homes.”

The business has gotten much tighter these days, he admits. “The popularity of brown spirits, aged rums and tequilas, for example, has created an immense demand. Everybody wants barrels. The major brokers try to get contracts set up with buyers, distillers want to establish exclusive relationships and the Japanese have come into the market strongly. They are very big on scotch. The Scotch themselves began using American oak something like 140 years ago.” After a five year study, Griffin recently added wine barrels to his portfolio. “I want to offer as large a palate as possible, but they are tricky, much more likely to become infected.”

Aside from the flavors they impart, barrels bring a distinctive charm and romance to craft brewing because they have a provenance. A keg is just a keg, but a barrel has a story to tell. It has been somewhere, maybe at the vineyard or distillery down the road, maybe across the ocean, maybe on an island paradise (Griffin is working on a deal to get rum barrels from the Caribbean and has shipped barrels to Brazil). And, sometimes, maybe just across the courtyard. Jeff Homer, brewmaster/owner of Cisco Brewers in Massachusetts, says, “we have brewery, winery and distillery tasting rooms all facing each other in a cobblestone courtyard and a small hop field located half a mile from the beach on Nantucket off the coast of Cape Cod. We buy new barrels, French Oak, and use them in our winery and then turn them into the brewery barrel program. Our distillery also provides barrels for the brewery program.”

Dave McLean in San Francisco can match that and raise the ante. He owns Magnolia Gastropub and Brewery and the Alembic, a small-batch spirits-centric bar/restaurant a few blocks down the street. “The Alembic buys barrels of whiskey from the distilleries so that we can sell all of the contents of one specific barrel to our guests as a house whiskey, usually a rye,” he says. “After they bottle our whiskey, they send us the empty barrel, which we take down the street to Magnolia and fill with beer. Assuming we haven’t run out of that particular bottling of whiskey, when we take a keg of that beer back to Alembic, it becomes possible to have a glass of rye whiskey and a glass of barrel-aged rye beer, both of which have spent time in the same barrel. If we aren’t planning to move toward a sour/wild beer in that barrel (which we haven’t yet), it ultimately gets cut in half and is used as a planter in the garden behind Alembic. There, it is used to grow vegetables and herbs for both restaurants. I’m not sure we’ve ever tracked it this precisely, but in theory one could be eating food from the Alembic kitchen that has been prepared with ingredients that came from a planter barrel out back while drinking both whiskey and beer that previously lived in that same barrel.”