Big Beautiful Barleywine

I brewed my first Barleywine a couple weeks ago. I love the style, it's a great beer to sip on in the middle of winter. I didn't have the sense to take a bunch of pictures but I do have a shot of my 17.5 gallon mash tun filled for a partigyle brew from the Barleywine mash :). The Barleywine mash itself was at the very top.

Since this was my first attempt at a Barleywine I purchased a great resource on the subject that never made it to me by brew day :(. 

I ordered this book along with some canning jars which broke during shipping so Fedex sent it back to the sender and I had to rely on my usual resources for brewing a new style. The BJCP guidelines, AHA recipes section, and microbreweries that list ingredients for their beers (I love the breweries that do this! Thank you Smuttynose, Ommegang, Avery etc...)

I chose to brew an English version of Barleywine, I like the complex malty and estery/fruity profile of this version without the added layers of hopping. I plan on aging the majority and enjoying it over the next few years to see how it evolves, according to the book above I made the right choice as the less hoppy English versions tend to age better.

Here is the recipe:

Overview

Name	Category	Brewer	OG	FG	ABV	SRM	IBU
Untested: English Barley Wine	English Barleywine	FerventBrewer	1.102	1.032	9.3 %	18.0 SRM	50.5 IBUs

Fermentables

Amount	Name	Diastatic Power	Color	Notes
16 lbs	Brewers Malt 2-Row (Briess)	140.0000000	1.8 SRM	Flavor:Mild Malty Smoother, less grainy flavor than 6-row
4 lbs	Munich Malt, Germany (Avangard)	72.0000000	9.5 SRM	A malt with enough diastatic power to convert itself but often used in conjunction with other base malts to contribute maltiness and an orange color.
4 lbs	Vienna Malt (Gambrinus)	90.0000000	6.0 SRM	Higher kilning temperatures give this Vienna malt its deep golden color and strong malt flavor.
8.0 oz	Caramel/Crystal Malt - 40L	0.0000000	40.0 SRM	Adds body, color and improves head retention. Also called "Crystal" malt.
8.0 oz	Caramel/Crystal Malt - 80L	0.0000000	80.0 SRM	Adds body, color and improves head retention. Also called "Crystal" malt.
8.0 oz	Crystal 150, 2-Row, (Great Western)	0.0000000	150.0 SRM	Crystal 150 (145-155°L) Similar to the C120, but with a much more intense flavor and color. May get a hint of the burnt character.

Hops

Amount	Name	Alpha Acids	Time	Notes
0.75 oz	Warrior	15.0000000	60.0 min	High alpha hops from Yakima Chief Ranches. Also called YCR-5. Mild aroma and low cohumulone content - primarily for bittering. Used for: Ales, stouts Aroma: Neutral, clean, mild Substitutes: Nugget, Columbus, Magnum
1.00 oz	Fuggle	4.5000000	20.0 min	Traditional English-type aroma hop. Used for: English Ales, ESB, Bitter, Lagers Aroma: Mild, soft, fruity, spicy, woody Substitute: Fuggle (U.S.), Willamette, Styrian Golding Storage: Good/Very Good (70-80% AA after 6 months at 20 C) 3-5.6% AA 2-3% Beta
1.00 oz	Chinook	13.0000000	10.0 min	Strong versatile bittering hop Used for: Ales, porters, stouts Aroma: Heavy and spicy aroma Substitutes: Galena, Eroica, Nugget, Bullion Examples: Sierra Nevada Stout, Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale
1.00 oz	Fuggle	4.5000000	10.0 min	Traditional English-type aroma hop. Used for: English Ales, ESB, Bitter, Lagers Aroma: Mild, soft, fruity, spicy, woody Substitute: Fuggle (U.S.), Willamette, Styrian Golding Storage: Good/Very Good (70-80% AA after 6 months at 20 C) 3-5.6% AA 2-3% Beta
1.00 oz	Mt. Hood	6.0000000	2.0 min	Used for: European Lagers, finishing Aroma: Mild with a clean aroma, neutral flavor. Somewhat pungent. Substitutes: Hallertauer, Liberty, Crystal

Yeast

Amount	Name	Attenuation	Notes
35.49 ml	English Ale	66.5000000	Classic ESB strain best for English style milds, bitters, porters and English style stouts. Leaves a clear beer with some residual sweetness.

Mash Steps

Amount	Type	Name	Ratio	Temp	Time	Description
8.47 gal	Infusion	Mash In	1.250 qt/lb	66.6666667	45.0000000	Add 8.47 gal of water at 171.2 F

I did take a couple liberties here. I used 2-Row with a mix of munich and vienna to emulate a more complex base malt like marris otter. This choice was one of convenience, I had munich and vienna and no marris otter. The other was using chinook, I had 1oz left from my harvest this year and the bag had come unsealed so I wanted to use it up. They smelled amazing so I backed off my bittering addition and added some chinook toward the end of the boil.

Brew day was pretty easy and I only added about an hour to the end of my normal brew day for the partigyle, it's nice having some extra equipment laying around.

I bottled it last weekend before reading (or even receiving) Barley Wine. My plan was to bottle condition for 90+ days, the book suggests a 90 day conditioning in secondary then another 90 days of bottle conditioning before release. Since I already fucked that up I go with my original plan as follows.

• 2 weeks - Taste a bottle after carbonation
• Taste 1 bottle every month until I'm happy with the results
• Save 5 bottles marked with a year to taste 1 each year for the next 5 years alongside new batches brewed every year
• Give a few bottles as gifts and drink the rest as the mood strikes me

Because I want this to become an annual brew along with my Belgian Dark Strong I started designing a label to have some grogtags made up. What do you think?

I'll try to post some tasting notes somewhere around the 90 day mark then 180 to see how much of a difference it makes.

Fred Eckart Predicts AB inBev's Current Takeover Strategy

In  episode 20 of BrewingTV Fred Eckardt predicts what AB inBev is currently doing to craft beer. Essentially buying it up in order to stay relevant. Have a look starting at 15:45 and ending at 16:45, it's uncanny how on the head he hit that nail. I think 2011 is when AB inBev purchased its first craft brewery that I'm aware of, Goose Island, so this is near a completely uninformed guess as it was published in October of 2010.

Yeast Banking - First Slant

I don't think I wrote about making my slants but I created them when I was canning some extra wort for starters. I wrote about that in this post http://blog.ferventbrewer.com/2016/10/canning-wort-for-starters.html. I simply used the methods taught in this blog post https://suigenerisbrewing.blogspot.com/2015/11/easy-home-yeast-banking-and-video.html?showComment=1476448076312#c8864034177591573235 from Sui Generis, it's a much better resource than I could ever be on the subject.

I did have to wait three days to get this much colonization from streaking. There were a couple small colonies after two days but then boom, full slant on day three.

So the next step was to safely (working around my alcohol lamp and flaming lips) poor my sanitized mineral oil into the slant on top of my colonies to preserve them for up to 3 years! With that done I placed them in my refrigerator for safe keeping!

This process does not take much time or effort to accomplish. I may have added 10 minutes to my last brew day to collect and sterilize my wort, slants and mineral oil and to create my agar slants. I now have enough slants to keep 8 different yeast banked which will save me some real money and trips to the brew store over the next couple of years.

AHA Hidden Corner of Awesomeness

I've been an AHA member  for about 2 years now. I frequent the site and love the access to Zymurgy online, beer trivia, and especially the winner's recipe database.

Well today I found a little gem that makes my membership well worth it. There's a Research and Education Fund section under Community that offers funds to homebrew clubs or individuals who wish to participate in an experiment. The results get posted for completed projects and are available to all AHA members! That's very cool!

If you're an AHA member be sure to check it out (you need to sign in first!) at https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/community/research-and-education-fund/completed-proposals/

Canning Wort For Starters

I'm sure this is a subject blogged/vlogged about multiple times but since this was my first experience with the process I'll just write a bit about it.

I had a planned brewed day last Friday, I was going to brew a Barleywine. This changed because I wanted to get some wort canned and I wanted to get another use out the WLP002 before kicking the shit out of it with a Barleywine.

Anyway I wanted this to be an easy drinker with an O.G. of 1.045 so I could also harvest some wort for future starters. This is what I did.

1. Adjust the recipe to make an extra gallon for canning. Beersmith made this a snap, I just scaled the existing recipe then reset my hop additions to what they were originally (we're going to be removing the extra gallon before hopping begins).
2. Mash and batch sparge as usual then start the boil.
3. Once the wort had boiled about 10 minutes and before adding any hops I filled each jar using the jar clamp canning accessory tool I purchase with my pressure cooker. Since I was using a pressure cooker to can rather than a liquid bath I didn't need to pre-sanitize my jars, everything would be killed in the cooker.
4. I placed a lid on each jar and lightly screwed the ring down. This allows the jars to vent before eventually sealing on cool down. 
5. I pressure cooked at 15psi for 20 minutes then allowed the cooker to cool for 1.5 hours before removing the lid and testing each jar for a seal. I had one that didn't seal and I think it's because it fell over against the side of the cooker and knocked the lid slightly off. I had a different size jars in the cooker plus my slants so I'm not surprised they moved around a bit.

Anyways this was a very simple process and didn't add any time to my brew day and I now have 3 1L starters worth of wort ready to go . It always killed me to pay $15 for 3lbs of DME, You might get 5 1L starters from that much DME. It might cost me $3 in extra grain to get the same thing from wort, that's pretty good savings over time.

Yeast Banking 1 - Supplies

I've been following Sui Generis's blog for a while now. He's definately an authority on yeast and yeast handling and he's very good at explaining things so even I can understand them :)

He has a nice video on yeast banking with slants which according to him is simple and will keep yeast usable for up to 3 years. http://suigenerisbrewing.blogspot.com/2015/11/easy-home-yeast-banking-and-video.html

So I went out and bought the supplies I would need to start banking my own yeast. I'm very tired of paying $9 or $10 for liquid yeast cultures every time I want to brew. I wrote about his in my Brewing Budget post. I spent about $130 on all the supplies because I didn't own a pressure cooker which is required to really sanitize the agar, mineral oil and starter wort. The pressure cooker was $60 so the rest cost about $70 to get started. That includes that nice stainless slant rack ($17) which I thought I needed to hold the slants ($19 for 25) while in the pressure cooker.

If I had owned a pressure cooker I could recoup the cost in less than 8 brews but it's going to be more like 14. That's about 5 months worth of brewing for me so the return on investment is a ways out. The nice thing is that pressure cooker is a canner and steamer so I can use it can some wort for starters when I brew and save on DME as well. That will go a long ways in cost savings and convenience I think.

If you're interested in banking your own yeast I highly recommend checking out this blog http://suigenerisbrewing.blogspot.com/. There are several videos on streaking, making agar and yeast wrangling.

Modern English Porter (Vanilla) - Tasting Notes

This is the beer I pitched onto of my brown ale yeast cake that fermented in 1 day. I wrote about that here. I kegged and fined with gelatin 4 days after brew day then added 2 vanilla beans for 36 hours tasting it along the way. After only 2 hours I could taste vanilla in the 5 gallon batch. At 18 hours it was probably enough pull the beans but I let it go a bit more just to make it a little more prominent. Then I forgot to pull the beans out the next morning and so we hit the 36 hour mark last night. I was worried but I needn't have been. This beer is so smooth and the vanilla is not overpowering in the least. It's just adding some complexity to a pretty good base beer.

Appearance - Nice black color except around the edges where it's more brown. Not out of place for a porter. The head is a fluffy tan color. It has decent staying power but eventually the oils from the beans do wipe it out.

Aroma - You can smell the vanilla, other than that I don't get much on the nose of this beer.

Mouthfeel - Better than I expected. Because of the overpitch the F.G. was much lower than predicted at 1.010. I would have expected a thin, dry beer but it's not. There's some body and slickness like you would get from an oatmeal stout. This might be from the flaked barley in the recipe or maybe the vanilla beans but I think that was there pre-dry-beaning.

Taste - Vanilla for sure. Not sharp alcohol vanilla like you get from some cheap extracts or faked vanillas but a smooth fresh and tasty vanilla. There's absolutely no roast in here. In fact if there wasn't any vanilla in this beer it would be pretty plane. Some chocolate but not much at all.

Future Changes - Some roast would add character to this beer, but not too much. This would be a good beer to introduce people to dark beers with because there's nothing in your face or over the top. A very good base to allow adjuncts to shine like chocolate, coffee or vanilla.

Fruiting A Sour

I don't have much experience with fruiting my sour beers. The only one I have fruited was a 1 gallon test batch with blueberries where I used 1lb/gal. That was enough to get great color but very little flavor.

I have a batch of golden sour in a 10 gallon barrel that had reached 1.000 but was only very lightly tart. I wanted a little more out of the beer so I decided to fruit it. This will give it a little more sugar to keep fermenting and hopefully some nice fruit character as well.

I decided to use what was on sale this time of year and that happened to be nectarines and plums at my local grocery store. I purchased enough to use 2lb/gal. Obviously I'm splitting the 10 gallon batch into two 5 gallons batches, one for each fruit.

I set the fruit out on my table for a week to ripen. I tasted each fruit and neither were so delicious I couldn't stay out of them, so it may be a mistake using them, but I already bought 20 lbs of fruit so onward we go.

It's been about a month since I cut up the fruit and siphoned the beer on top of them. There's been very little fermentation activity. The fruit is floating and any parts exposed to air are rotting. I swirl the carboys to cover them in acidic beer, I don't know if this is helping or not. Hopefully it keeps the fruit from molding and I don't lose 10 gallons of beer :(

I thought a pellicle was forming but it turned out to be slight fermentation activity, hopefully were gaining a little more tartness.

The beer has quite a bit of fruit pectin haze now where it was perfectly clear when I first fruited it so I think the fruit is breaking down. Another month and I should be able to cold crash and bottle. Waiting is the hardest part!