1st Barleywine

Well kiddos, its time to buck up and brew a barleywine. Here is my recipe:

17 lbs 06 oz Briess 2-Row (73.9%)
03 lbs 08 oz Simpson's Golden Promise (14.9%)
01 lbs 02 oz Cane Sugar (4.8%)
00 lbs 08 oz Honey Malt (2.1%)
00 lbs 08 oz Crystal 20L (2.1%)
00 lbs 08 oz Crystal 80L (2.1%)

1.00 Oz Magnum - 60 Min
1.00 Oz Amarillo - 25 Min
1.00 Oz Cascade -25 Min
1.00 Oz Columbus- 25 Min
1.00 Oz Amarillo - 1 Min
1.00 Oz Cascade -1 Min
1.00 Oz Columbus- 1 Min

White Labs WLP007 Dry English Ale

90 Minute Mash at 152
90 Minute Boil

OG: 1.100
FG: 1.018
SRM 10.2
ABV 10.9%
IVU 80

That looks like a fine recipe. Good luck getting that FG. Sugar is a great idea.

My experience with my first Barleywine:

• I racked it onto a yeast cake (from previous beer), it blew a mile high. I lost at least a third of it to raging blowoff. That was with fermentation temp control too, but I probably pitched warm. Blew in 2 hours.
• When it finished, it had acetaldehyde bad. Green apple. This went away after 2 years (it was still there at 1 year).
• It didn't carb. I had to open bottles and add good yeast.
• It finished way too sweet. Hard to overdo the hops here. I had 60 IBU in a beer that ended up at 1.120, and that isn't gonna cut it. I added hop extract when I added more yeast to the bottles.
• I had one a month or two ago, and this is the first timie I've been able to enjoy one of them. I guess they are still improving. They are almost 3 years old now.

Good luck!

Oh dear. This should be fun!

I won 1st place in a local comp with it though, so there is that!

Definitely a good looking recipe.

I think you can hit 1.018 with a mash of 152. I didn't have any blowoff issues, but I did miss my mash temp by a bit. I ended up mashing at like 144 or 146 for 90 mins. It ended up going from 1.115 to 1.012. It took about 4 months for the harshness to go away. I also didn't use any sugar. Definitely make sure you pitch enough yeast and keep fermentation temp in check. Too high will give you some awful high alcohols that will take forever to age out.

Also be careful when carbing them. I put 12 of them in a cabinet above my fridge to carb because I needed the space. I didn't realize that it got to around 80F in that cabinet. Those 12 bottles had some crazy perfume flavors and smells going on. It was like someone dumped a shot of perfume in them. All of the others were fine.

Where did your final gravity end up? In retrospect, Im probably looking to mash this thing at 148 to maximize my fermentables. WLP007 is a nasty workhorse, so Im hoping that 148 and 5% sugar will help me get it under 1.020. My experience with 007 is that you can easily and predictably get 80% attenuation and it is highly effective in high gravity brews. The other consideration was/is using WLP099 in hopes of possibly accomplishing a 1.015 FG. I know its going to be work and I should probably plan on allowing the bulk of the heavy fermentation occur at or below 65 to prevent rocket fuel and then warm it up.

148-150 for 90 is a better idea if you wanna try to get under 20.

any particular reason you want to get that low in the first place? i'd think ~1.025-30 would be very balance for the style.

Looks good to me. I like doing american barley wines and like them a little dry too. I use pacman for my barley wines and that monster always attenuates them pretty low.

motobrewer said:

148-150 for 90 is a better idea if you wanna try to get under 20.

any particular reason you want to get that low in the first place? i'd think ~1.025-30 would be very balance for the style.

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I've always preferred my barleywines drier than sweet. I'd be super pleased at 1.018 although I could cope with low 20's.

mhenry41h said:

Where did your final gravity end up? In retrospect, Im probably looking to mash this thing at 148 to maximize my fermentables. WLP007 is a nasty workhorse, so Im hoping that 148 and 5% sugar will help me get it under 1.020. My experience with 007 is that you can easily and predictably get 80% attenuation and it is highly effective in high gravity brews. The other consideration was/is using WLP099 in hopes of possibly accomplishing a 1.015 FG. I know its going to be work and I should probably plan on allowing the bulk of the heavy fermentation occur at or below 65 to prevent rocket fuel and then warm it up.

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I did a 14% barleywine last year. With a lot of tricks I got it down to 1.020 on the button and managed to keep the fusels down. mashed at 147 IIRC.

I separated the wort into two parts. The first part was first runnings that I did a no chill method on. The second runnings were lower gravity. I aerated the crap out of it and pitched a huge starter of 099. After two days of fermenting I dumped in the second half of the wort, along with a couple droplets of olive oil and aerated again. This kept the yeast happy and in good health, so it attenuated well and no (or little) fusels.