There was a time when spotting a wax-dipped 750ml bottle of barrel-aged imperial stout or wild ale in a craft beer fridge wasn’t particularly unusual.

Today, they’re becoming much harder to find.

And there’s a simple reason: barrel-aged beer is almost the opposite of efficient brewing.

A normal beer might occupy a fermenter for a matter of weeks. A barrel-aged beer can spend months — sometimes years — sitting in oak before the brewer knows exactly what they’ve created.

During that time the brewery has money tied up in ingredients, barrels, storage space and labour without earning a cent from the beer.

Then there’s evaporation — the famous “angel’s share” — and the possibility that after months of ageing, the beer simply isn’t good enough to release.

As FOUND. head brewer Will Irving told The Crafty Pint, years of ageing can effectively be ruined by something as simple as a popped bung.

That helps explain the price when one finally reaches the bottle shop.

But Australian drinking habits have changed.

With cost-of-living pressures biting, cheaper lagers and hazies are generally an easier proposition than expensive large-format bottles designed to be slowly shared. Some specialist barrel and mixed-fermentation programs have closed, paused or contracted as a result.

Western Australia, however, isn’t giving up.

Night of the Barrels is returning at Froth Town in Perth, bringing together five WA breweries with one-off barrel-aged beers.

The idea revives an event whose origins stretch back 16 years to Fremantle’s Sail & Anchor, where rare Australian beers were presented not merely for drinking, but as an opportunity to educate people about what beer could become.

That educational element might be important.

Because barrel-aged beer isn’t expensive simply because somebody decided to put it in a fancy bottle.

You’re paying for time, storage, evaporation, uncertainty and experimentation.

And if nobody is prepared to pay for those things, breweries eventually stop making them.