Imperial IPA/Barleywine - how big?

Hey guys,

It's been a long time since I have posted and brewed (almost a year!), things have been crazy in my life! My new thinking is because I don't have the time to brew multiple times per month and because I really enjoy higher alcohol/flavor beers, I should concentrate on just a few of these instead of multiple smaller beers. I LOVE imperial IPAs (its been Strong Beer month in Feb here in SF and have had some killer beers!), such as Pliny the Elder, and am beginning to love barleywines, and I want to know the feasability of these beers with my set-up. Here it is:

I have a 30 qt aluminum turkey fryer set-up with a 10 gallon Coleman mash tun. I am not worried about the price of hops, etc, but what I would love to hear is can I extract enough sugars and get a huge beer with only 7.5 gallons (thats max to the top) of boiling room. I have made a belgian strong ale that was around 9% ABV, but obviously a good chunk of that OG was Belgian candy sugar. I have no problem with supplementing with DME, but I would hate to put so much effort into this and not have it taste great.

Anyways, just kind of talking out loud here. I would love to hear other people's thoughts on this and what they have done. Thanks so much for your input and I look forward to getting back into the game!

Jason

Do a partial mash! If you need to kick up the gravity a little just add a pound of pale DME.

In the future you may want to lose the 30qt pot that came with the turkey fryer and get a heavy duty 50-60qt. I have a 40 and wish I went with a 50 for a little extra head room. I use the 30qt to heat water on my stovetop for the mash.

Want high gravity?

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f13/1-200-20-120-minute-iipa-100549/


I haven't brewed this one yet... its up next tho...

http://jdhaesloop.com/56 - English Barleywine.pdf

i brewed a slightly modified version of brewpastor's water into barleywine about a month ago using a very similar setup to yours and the samples so far have tasted amazing. it's got a nice hop presence of bitterness and flavor, so i'd consider it a barleywine for iipa fans.

the issue with a 30 qt pot is going to be extracting enough sugar, as you have identified. i also don't have a ton of time to brew so sparging ten gallons worth and boiling down to volume really wasn't an option for me. what i did was use beersmith to replace a portion of the base malt with DME to get the same gravity and mashed low to ensure good attenuation.

i also did not adjust the hops and added the dme at the end of the boil, so i ended up with better hop utilization than the original recipe (which is just fine with me).

finally, i held off on adding the maple syrup (actually, i used table sugar instead) until after primary fermentation had slowed to a crawl. this got things going again and i credit it with taking my wort from 1.100 to 1.018 in a week at 68 degrees. i also pitched onto the cake from an ipa, but two or three packets of nottingham should do the trick as well.

this is gonna be hard to keep around til it's mature. i've got another batch of this scheduled in a few weeks.

How about you just make an extremely hoppy Pale Ale recipe, do about 6.5 gallons preboil, then with 15 mins left in boil when you have some extra room in the pot stir in a few lbs. of DME. That way you should get some decent extraction from the hops but still end up with a nice high gravity at the end. Plus only boiling the DME for 15 mins should keep the beer slightly lighter.

I bet you could make a killer IIPA this way.

You can do it without partial mashing and all that jazz, but you'll have to go the long way. You can lauter about 6.5 gallons or so, and then boil that down to make room for whatever else you need to sparge from the mash to reach your target OG. It's not so much a pain as it is a time sink (although, it's not much different than boiling down the full volume).


TL

Yeah, that just increases your boil time. You can very easily drop in a couple pounds of DME and save yourself 60-90 minutes worth of boiling...

Thanks guys! I would actually like to try the adding 2-3 lbs DME at the end procedure and see how it works. I bet it will be awesome! I definitely need to upgrade at some point, but im pushing my limit as it is in my SF flat! I'll be cooking up a good recipe over the next week or so and will likely post it for some critiques. Keep the suggestions coming!

Jason

My first barley wine was a partial mash, about 60% grain and the rest LME. Worked fine, although it took a long time for the peat to mellow.

I've upgraded my gear, so I can parti-gyle the next one.

You should have no problems with a 10 gallon cooler doing 4 gallons of beer up to 1.090 or so. If you want to do 5 gallons as others have said you can use some extract.

I have the same set-up as you and was able to do the 999 barleywine with a little fiddling. I had to stagger my boil, adding more runnings as the wort boiled off. I ended with nearly 2.5 hours of boil and 5 gallons of 1.165 OG yumminess. The biggest problem I had was getting the lid on my 10gal cooler to close on 26lbs of grains.

So yes it can be done.

Terje