northern brewer barley wine - any tips ?

So this will be my 5th brew and first barley wine. This extract kit seems pretty straight forward but I thought Id ask if anybody had any tips or tweaks for making it as good as it can be.

If there is no tweaks Ill just be following the directions.

Thanks guys

My suggestion would be to not leave it in secondary too long. I moved to secondary after 3 weeks. I tasted it at 4 months in secondary and it was great. I let it get to 6 months then bottled. It's just my opinion but drinking it now I wish I bottled earlier at the 4 mark. The flavors are muddled now. The fruit notes are way too light for my taste and it's taken on a slightly woody note that I'm not pleased with. Just my opinion though.

Make a starter. I don't think the NB instructions say anything about that.

Add more dme/lme. I'm not sure how much they give you, but its prob not enough, lol. Just kidding....but seriously...think about it.

Have beers around because this ones going to need a lot of aging.

Good luck!

make sure to pitch plenty of yeast (see mrmalty.com) and keep your fermentation temps down. bigger beers can be even more exothermic so you really need to keep tabs on it unless you like the taste of rocket fuel. look into swamp cooler or some other method to keep those temps in check.

toss it in a secondary and forget about it for months & get started on the next beer

Consider the use of a blow off tube.

So, I started a smaller beer last week (N.B. Innkeeper). Next week Ill be racking to bottles then Ill pitch the B. Wine onto the yeast cake left behind by the Innkeeper. I will be using a blow off tube and a fridge with regulator to keep the temperatures in check. Im thinking I will leave in the primary & fridge for a month, then rack to secondary for 3 months. Then bottle.

Thanks for the input guys. Any other thoughts are appreciated

You could leave it in the fridge for the first week and then take it out or up the temp to help the yeast finish up their job. This is just from my experience from the one and only time I brewed this kit but it ended up sweeter than I would like with a relatively high final gravity. With that in mind I would add a bit of corn sugar to the kit if I did it again. Maybe half a pound, no more than one pound though.

What yeast are you using for the Innkeeper, if it's the Yorkshire I also would be worried it would drop out and not finish the job on a Barleywine because it has a medium/high flocculation listed. To counter this on big beers after a week or so I like to lightly swirl my carboys three times a day to keep the yeast in suspension. No splashing, just swirling. This should help them finish up.

Most of these comments are actually listed in my newest blog posting on big beer brewing which is in my signature below.

I'll be using safale us-05

Bronco1500 said:

I'll be using safale s-05

Click to expand...

Was gonna recommend a starter and blow off tube too. Better to make sure u pitch correctly, but even with dry yeast, mr malty recommends more then one whole 11g pack because the OG is so high (Target OG from NB web site is 1.082. I'd say go with an extra pack of yeast if u don't wanna make a starter and then use some yeast for bottling as their instructions recommend that.

I just ordered this kit too...I found out I'll be a daddy again and since swmbo can't drink, I promised I wouldn't go crazy brewing summer beers.

Blowoff and starter go without saying. although my last 2 big beers had VERY LARGE blowoffs, and I was out of town for work both times. Needless to say, swmbo was more than pissed after the second time she had to clean up my mess, so she did some research and kindly requested I invest in some fermcap-s. anyone used this stuff? I haven't yet and now I have four beers to brew and am curious if its okay stuff.

I'm adding sweet orange peel, d-45 candi syrup, and bourbon soaked heavy toast French oak cubes. Also, another .5 oz Willamette at 15 and 1oz cascade at 10.

Any thoughts?

I already changed my mind on the oak...after doing some reading, I think I'm going to soak my oak cubes in a red wine now. Yummy.

Also might cut out the orange if I'm adding wine soaked oak? Don't know if those 2 will mix well