Tröegs Brewing: Splinter Cellar is easily the best named barrel aging program ever

The creative consciousness behind Tröegs Brewing Co. announced a new structure earlier this year — the Splinter Cellar. Sounds suitably badass, right? In our minds we imagine a Tom Clancy story about Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford variant), espionage and beer aging, but in reality, Tröegs’ Splinter Cellar is nearly as cool, housing Tröegs’ wood-aged specialty beers.

Imagine three 23-foot wooden foeders, glass exterior walls, a new entrance for behind-the-scenes guided tours and international intrigue. That’s Splinter Cellar, and it continues to take shape. Just last week, the Splinter Cellar added new tools to its arsenal. The 30 barrels in the video above will help Tröegs develop components for Nebulous, Wild Elf and a sour brown ale they’ve been working on. From the Tröegs website:

We’ve been making wood-aged beers in oak barrels almost as long as we’ve been brewing Scratch beers. Our first project, Splinter Gold (2009 release), used Scratch #3 as the base beer; since then we’ve released other Splinter beers periodically. About eight months ago, we installed three smaller foeders to ramp up the program. Our first large volume Splinter project features Mad Elf aged with more than 600 pounds of Balaton cherries we sourced from Peters Orchard in Adams County. The progress on this beer (soon to be known as Wild Elf) has been so promising we want keep it going and the Splinter Cellar will give us that opportunity.