Barlewine

One of the things I wanted to do this year while I was on vacation was brew up a barleywine to celebrate myself and Julia's anniversary. The idea is that I'll be able to ferment it for a couple months, bottle it, and store it away so that we can open a bottle every year on our anniversary. Since this beer is being made to age, I hopped it up pretty aggressively, and made it out to be a high alcohol content. Since I have my cooler now and can do all-grain, I wanted the beer to be (mostly) all-grain. Of course, there are limits to how much my cooler can handle, so I made my recipe 18 lbs of grain, and 2 lbs of malt extract. I'm also thinking I'll put some maple syrup in there after the initial fermentation calms down to boost it a bit more. The original gravity was supposed to be 1.119, but I ended up at 1.108, so with some of the things that happened today I lost about 2% of my final ABV that I'd like to make up. As it is without any further adjustments, I should end up around 10.5%, but I'm shooting more for 12%. This will make it the strongest beer I've done yet.

Because this is such a big beer, I knew I needed a good yeast and a lot of it. I chose to use WLP001 (California Ale) for it's clean flavors and high alcohol tolerance. Rather than spending a lot of time and effort building up a big starter for the beer, I decided to make a stout for my starter and wash the yeast. The idea was that I would bottle the stout the day before brewing the barleywine, boil and cool some water to sterilize it, mix the water in, and pour the yeast left on the bottom of the fermenter into jars. After sitting a bit, the trub in the jars would settle to the bottom, and I could pour the yeast off the top into a second sterilized jar. I'm not sure how good of a job I really did, but I ended up with a few very full pint jars of yeast, and one not so full jar. You can see two jars in the picture. Using the Mr. Malty pitching rate calculator, I determined that I needed about half a pint jar to properly ferment the beer. Since the jars are just a bit over half full of yeast, I decided to use an entire jar's worth after pouring the clear liquid off the top.

There were a few things that I took away from today since it was my first really big brew. First is to be prepared for my mash. I have some PH strips that I use to measure my mash PH and make sure it's in acceptable ranges. Today my mash was very low, and I found out that one way to raise the PH is with baking soda. Of course, we didn't have any, so 5 minutes into the mash I had to run to the grocery store and buy some. I added a half a teaspoon, mixed up the mash really well, and it took it to a more normal range.

The second thing I discovered is that my pot just isn't big enough to handle that much liquid. One of the reasons I got so much less of an original gravity than I anticipated was that I didn't get nearly the efficiency I was anticipating from my mash. The other was that the pot foamed over when it started boiling, and I ended up getting sugar-concentrated foam all over my stove. My pot was near full when I started the boil, so I'm attributing that to the boil-over. The reason the pot was so full was that I mashed with a full 5 gallons of water, and then had almost another 4 gallons to sparge with (I still think I didn't sparge with enough water to really get most of the fermentable sugars out either.) I got slightly over 2.5 gallons of first runnings out of my mash tun, and with the other 4 gallons that left me with near 7 gallons to boil. My pot's capacity is only 7 gallons, so I ended up having to put one gallon in a separate pot, and slowly feed the extra wort into the boil kettle as I boiled off liquid. I don't know if this is even an acceptable technique, but it's the best I could think of.

Finally I learned that all-grain brewing takes a lot longer than extract or partial mash. In order to boil off enough liquid to end up with about 5 gallons in the fermenter, I ended up boiling for close to 3 hours. Of course, I didn't have enough time to do all of my boil and cool down the beer before the class I had to teach today, so once again improvising, I boiled down to a little over 6 gallons before I had to leave, turned off the heat and covered the pot, and left to go teach my class. When I came back, I brought the pot back to a boil, and started my normal hop additions. Fortunately I wasn't planning on adding even the bittering hops for more than 60 minutes, so I think I was able to do this with minimal impact on the final beer.

We'll have to see how this one turns out, but if all goes well I won't even know for another year or so. If I get to 12%, at roughly 120 IBUs, this is going to be a big, hoppy monster.

- Adam