Barleywine taste is kinda yucky...

I made a Barleywine last winter and a few weeks ago I bottled it up. The last bottle had quite a bit of headspace and so I set that aside with a label so that I could sample it and see how it was tasting.

So, last night I decided to pop it open and see what it was like. There was a huge PHSSSTTT! as the large volume of CO2 escaped the bottle. Fine.

Pour was a bti thick, as expected, and massive amount of thick head. It was well chilled, so I spent a few minutes holding the glass, and smelling it. No hop aroma, but plenty of molasses, toffe, raisin.

Finally took a drink, and man was that syrupy! All the aromas came through on the flavor too. Very sweet and malty and lots of other stuff going on too. I'm thinking it's almost too sweet to drink for me.

It tasted pretty good at bottling time, and it wasn't that long ago. I think I could have easily doubled the hops on this one! I even dropped 2 cones from my Cascade plants to see if that would give it at least some aroma, but that just made the flavor worse.

I know that letting it age more might change the flavor, but for a 1.100 beer, even the alcohol heat is very light! It secondaried for about 6 months.

I'm thinking at this time that I could at least reduce it down and use it for glazes or something...

What was your FG? One of the problems in building a barleywine is you lose all hop flavor and aroma as it ages, so the final beer has to be a balance between bitterness, alcohol and unfermentable malts. Barleywines are not hot weather beers. This may sound obvious, but all that sweetness will be much more appealing when there's frost on the windows. Try it again after the first snow.

How many IBU did you hop it to? Even the maltier English BW should be around 70 IBU, American styles even more. In fact, it should taste way over hopped in the first 6 months.

Well, this one was done a while back, and I'll have to see if I even have the recipe. It's basically something that they put together at the LHBS and I brewed it quickly one day (like usual).

Anyway, I was just thinking today that if I did not get a complete fermentation, and then I added more sugar and yeast, I have potential bottle bombs sitting there... I wonder if I should pour all those little bottles back into a bucket and let it finish. Maybe add a bit of hop tea or something.

Maybe I should move them to a plastic tote, just to be safe.