First Barley Wine - Feedback Appreciated

A friend and I are working on a Barley Wine recipe. We created it based on advice from Ray Daniels' "Designing Great Beers."

Here's the recipe:

Volume: 5 Gallons
Estimated Original Gravity: 1.109
Estimated Final Gravity: 1.030
Estimated Alcohol% (ABV): 10.30
Estimated Bitternes (IBU): 72

2 Row 17.00 lbs
Caramel/Crystal 40L 1.00 lbs
Munich 1.50 lbs

Chinook (13.00%) 2.50 oz Boil for 60.00 min
Cascade (6.25%) 1.00 oz Boil for 15.00 min
Cascade (6.25%) 1.00 oz Add at knockout

Mash at 154 degrees for 60.00 minutes

Safale US-05 (probably pitch two packets)

The plan is to brew this up on March 30. All advice welcomed.

Looks good, but I'll make a big starter instead of just pitching 2 packs of us-05. Otherwise you won't reach your FG and the beer might be too sweet.

Ho, and us-05, not sure about that, why don't you try a barleywine american yeast. Not sure us-05 will handle this OG and you're alcool containt

I aerated my 2&1/2 gallon batch of 1.090 BW to death, pitched 1 vial of WLP005 and it chowed it down to 1.020 in 4 weeks, tasted great going into secondary. will bottle at the end of this month, next year will tell you how it turned out

US-05 should work well and I would guess you should get a lower FG than 1.03 as that's still alot of residual sweetness. I made one similar to this last year (based on a Rogue old crustacean clone) and used some C-120 and chocolate malt to darken it up a bit. Your SRM at this point would be pretty light, not that there's anything wrong with that if that is what you are going for.
Looking at your hop schedule I'd wonder about using that much Chinook at 60 minutes unless you are looking for a bittering punch.

I personally would say mash lower to try and lower your FG. unless you are going for a sweet beer to balance all those bittering hops.

Also I have heard US-05 can do a big beer like this. You just have to treat it right. lots of yeast, lots of O2.

I wondered about mashing a bit lower. We're going to do a BIAB and were thinking of starting the mash at 154 ... it will probably fall 4-5 degrees during the mash and we could choose not to fire the burner to bring it back up.

Good point on the aeration ... we'll shake the crap out of the carboy.

On the sweet/bitterness ... If I did the math right were at about .66 GU:BU in our estimates (were shooting for between .5 and 1).

mathin said:

Good point on the aeration ... we'll shake the crap out of the carboy.

Click to expand...

if you can do more, I highly recommend.

if you have a power drill, pick up one of these for $7 at home depot


a ½minute is about all it takes

I use a starter of US-05 for my American barley wine (OG 1.91) and it chews it down to right around 1.016 in 3 weeks... don't underestimate us-05

also I would mash lower 150-152

Thanks for all the advice! We're brewing on Saturday. We've decide to mash at 152. And will be aerating with O2.