Our Barrel-Aged Program:

The Product of Patience

By Ben Keene
March 2021

It started with a dream and a handful of freshly emptied whiskey barrels. More than ten years ago, aspiring to brew something special for Seattle, co-founder Matt Lincecum and director of brewery operations Matt Lincoln put a batch of imperial winter ale into these American oak casks. Then they tucked them away in a corner of the brewery on North 34th Street. Both brewers were passionate about bourbon barrel-aged beers, and welcomed the challenge of creating their own.  

“It was one of the first things we talked about,” Lincecum says. “We’ve always liked that heavy, intense wood and vanilla character that comes from barrels. You can’t rush it, you can’t cut corners, and you’ve got to think long term. The wood really has to be ready.” 

“You start by writing a recipe for the barrel,” Lincecum continues, explaining that the goal was to make something that would be equally delicious fresh off the bottling line or after aging for up to a decade. “Don’t just put any beer in the barrel. How do you brew a beer that’s good in 10 years? That of course informs the recipe. The idea was that over time these beers will really come into their own.” 

But back to that imperial winter ale. When Lincecum and Lincoln sampled it about a year later, the taste was remarkable: toasted oak, bourbon, dark coffee, and leather mingled with sweeter notes of toffee, rich chocolate, dried fruit, and vanilla. Smooth and warming with enough bitterness to balance the pronounced sweetness, it was a beer to remember.

They decided to call it Bourbon Abominable.

Since then, Bourbon Abominable has become known as its affectionate nickname, B-Bomb, and our barrel program has slowly grown from a dozen or so Kentucky whiskey casks into a collection that now numbers over 1,400. Along the way, Lincecum and Lincoln have patiently pursued excellence, carefully selecting, filling, tasting, and blending barrels of 9, 12, and 24-month old beers into releases like B-BADS, a bourbon barrel-aged imperial oatmeal stout, and The Rusty Nail, an imperial stout made with brewer’s licorice and aged in bourbon barrels on cassia cinnamon chips. 

Each of these beers represents a different expression of the wood it has rested in, but they all have one thing in common. “Absolute quality throughout—that’s what really unites the barrel program,” Lincecum says. “And it’s pretty much a year-round process. It’s always barrel season at Fremont Brewing.”