Barrels

I used to make beer and store it in a 5 gallon plastic pressure barrel but after some time, it developed an unpleasant taint, due the the brown pigment. No amount of washing would remove it, so it's now a rain butt. These barrels are now made of white plastic.
I normally store and dispense my wine using 20 litre polypins. These are essentially large re-usable wine boxes and serve the purpose very well.
2 years ago I bought a ten gallon wooden barrel at a boot fair for £10. I have a large grapevine which usually produced enough to make 5 gallons of white wine, but that year was exceptional and I got 10 gallons, so I decided to use the barrel.
It had no bung, no tap and no hole to put a tap in.One of the hoops was missing. It had been dry for some time and I had no idea what had been stored in it. I tracked down a cork bung of suitable size, a wooden tap and made a replacement hoop from a strip of mild steel. Drilling the hole for the tap proved quite difficult because it had to be perfectly round and smooth to avoid leaks. I also had to make a stand to support it laying on its side. This added £20 to the cost. I also bought a secondhand home made fruit press for £40, but it had missing parts, for which I had to pay extra. My free home made wine was getting a bit expensive!
I placed it in the bath and filled it with a solution of very hot washing soda and left it overnight. Initially there were many leaks, but as the wood swelled, it leaked far less. When I drained it, the water came out a very murky brown. The next step was to fill it with a sulphite solution, further soaking and then a final rinse with water, the few remaining persistent leaks fixed using a standard sealant.
The whole point of storing wine in a wooden barrel is that it can gently breathe and pick up colour and flavour from the oak. Barrels smaller than 10 gallons are no good for white wines because they breathe too much, causing oxidisation, causing the wine to turn brown and spoil.
Having filled the barrel with my precious wine, I took regular samples from the tap. After just a week, I noticed the wine tasted ok but was turning decidedly more yellow, so I panicked and emptied the wine into whatever large liquid containers I had available, as I did not have the required 60 wine bottles. I turns out I need not have panicked. The wine was simply picking up colour from the wood, which is normal.
After a few years, the colour and flavour in the wood becomes exhausted and the barrels are replaced. Last autumn, I had another bumper harvest, and this time I was determined to age the wine in the barrel for 3 months. After the usual checks, there was no colour or flavour change, even after 2 months. The barrel was exhausted.
New oak barrels are expensive (£80-100) and hard to come by, so I hit upon the idea of putting toasted oak chips in the old one with the wine. All was going well, but as the weather started to warm up significantly and quickly, the barrel started to leak again, which is nigh impossible to fix when it is full of liquid. Very frustrating.
Meanwhile I had purchased a new 5 litre oak barrel for the purpose of ageing my apple brandy. However I only managed to make 5 bottles (well short of 5 litres) of the stuff before I ran out of cider.
Ho, hum!