Get a superior finish to your product and let it reach it’s FULL potential

Commodity barrels just waste all your time and money and can limit any chance for your product to breakout

What contributes to our barrel Sweetness and Complexity?

1. Water Bending–High temperature water soaking for bending
2. Pre-Toasting–Slow toasting of staves before subsequent charring (if required)

We make aging time machines!!  Our staves provide the largest (patented) surface area of any stave on the market.  If you choose to use Honey Comb Staves™, we have engineered Extreme Stave Surface Area allows for faster extraction of oak barrel components.

Surface and end grain exposure to extractive aqueous alcohol.

End grain is exposed by cross-cutting grooves into stave surfaces  or the matrix of CNC routed holes in stave.  These cuts allow aqueous alcohol to flow into the wood and extract multiple layers of caramelized sugars.

Each Honey Comb stave has a huge cross section exposed for the extraction of oak sourced sugars. We have been accused of having the sweetest whiskey barrels on the planet.  Accelerated Aging!!  Patented Honey Comb Staves

Managing product availability for bottling

Launching a new product or need to fill holes in product availability?  We can provide custom spreadsheets to help you reduce cost and reduce time to market!!  Ask us how to reduce oak costs while reducing time to market.

Check out this graph and peer reviewed paper: https://blackswanbarrels.com/links-accolades/

Q: Why are Black Swan Barrels better than commodity Barrels?

A: Please take a look at the “Innovation” tab for further details.

Black Swan Cooperage is a family-run cooperage in northern Minnesota. Our barrels are handcrafted from the finest American White Oak and overseen by a master cooper with more than twenty-five years of know how, experience and inventions.

Limiting Tannin Exposure

The flavor is what we’re about…we’ve been accused of having the sweetest barrels with the widest available selection of oak sourced sugars and reduced tannins.  The cross sectional area of our Patented HONEY COMB® barrel staves and flavor inserts cannot be beaten by ANY other barrel product on the market.

Barrel Alternatives

Along with our Black Swan Traditional Barrel, Black Swan Standard Barrel and Black Swan Patented HONEY COMB®, we feature the Black Swan HONEY COMB® Patented Barrel Alternative for flavoring and aging wine, beer, and spirits. Offering a variety of different wood species in addition to traditional White Oak, the HONEY COMB® Barrel Alternative brings an abundance of unique flavor profiles, maximizes extraction rates, and accelerates maturation.

All of our barrels are customizable for just the right toast and char level for your whiskey or beer!!

To talk about our Whiskey Barrels, please call Heidi at 1 (218) 237-2020