Production of prototype lab-scale oak barrel analogues using additive manufacturing
2025
Hugh Holds | Kerry Wilkinson | David Jeffery | Frances Jack | Sue Bastian
Experiments involving the maturation of wine or spirits in oak barrels are economically challenging to undertake, especially when there is a need for extensive replication to account for the compositional variability of oak wood. Barrel maturation is also difficult to emulate at a laboratory scale due to the significant increase in surface-area to volume ratio when working with smaller barrel formats. Cost-effective methods that provide a semi-permeable environment for oxygen transfer and modelling of barrel maturation environments while maintaining a more realistic surface to volume ratio would therefore be valuable for researchers. This preliminary research study investigated a novel use of additive manufacturing (3D printing) to fabricate cost-effective laboratory-scale maturation vessels that required less volume to fill but still achieved a surface-area-to-volume ratio of oak contact closer to that of a conventionally sized barrel. Experimental vessels and 28 L commercial casks were filled in replicate with grape distillate and aged for two years. Vessels were weighed at the completion of maturation to ascertain evaporative losses and extraction was measured using colour absorbance at 430 nm. Seventy eight percent of the experimentally produced vessels successfully held maturing spirit for the duration of a two-year maturation study. The vessels showed statistically significant improvements in the ratio of evaporation and extraction (both p < 0.0001) when compared to small format 28 L commercial sourced casks and accepted industry values for more common 220 / 300 L casks.
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