American Barleywine Her Majesty's Pleasure Fusion Barleywine (awards)

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Bobby_M

Vendor and Brewer
HBT Sponsor
Joined
Aug 3, 2006
Messages
27,823
Reaction score
9,067
Location
Whitehouse Station, NJ
Recipe Type
All Grain
Yeast
US-05
Yeast Starter
Slurry from previous batch
Batch Size (Gallons)
5
Original Gravity
1.118
Final Gravity
1.018
Boiling Time (Minutes)
120
IBU
64
Color
14 SRM
Primary Fermentation (# of Days & Temp)
30 @ 68F
Secondary Fermentation (# of Days & Temp)
90 @ 68F
Tasting Notes
Pretty darn smooth for a 13% beer. Just a slight bit of alcohol hotness.
This actually a SMASH (single malt/single hop beer) and it's surprisingly complex despite that fact. I call it a fusion BW because it's uses English malt/hop/IBU levels but has the alcohol level of an American.

28.0 lb Maris Otter mashed at 149F for 75 minutes.
1 lb White Table Sugar (Sucrose) added to boil.
2.0 oz East Kent Goldings (6.2%) - added during boil, boiled 60.0 min
3.0 oz East Kent Goldings (6.2%) - added during boil, boiled 5.0 min

The mash ratio was setup to achieve 8.75 gallons of runoff without infusing any sparge water. 11 gallons strike yields about 8.5 gallons preboil wort which works on my system for a two hour boil. This method works out to about 60% efficiency on a "normal" 75% average system. Go ahead and sparge for a smaller beer (good ESB if you cap the mash with a pound of Crystal 80L before putting the sparge in).

The wort was pitched on top of a fresh cake of US-05 because that's what I had. However, the beer attenuated a bit too much.

After a month in primary, rack to secondary on top of 2oz of French Oak chips that have been steamed, then soaked in a few ounces of bourbon. Leave in secondary for 3 months then keg or bottle.

The beer started scoring 39s (BJCP sheets) at about the 5 month mark. Took silver at BUZZoff 2009 in wood aged category.

If I could have fixed on aspect, I would have liked it to stop at about 12% ABV for a better balance.
 
a barleywine SMaSH! just brilliant! Looks and sounds like it's a great beer. May have to try me a barleywine one of these days.
 
Good thing you put "(awards)" in the title. Otherwise we may never have known how full of yourself you are, bobby ;););)
 
why steam the oak chips? i love the idea of doing a smaller beer from this also. Nice
 
why steam the oak chips? i love the idea of doing a smaller beer from this also. Nice

Ditto if you are soaking?

What color was this?

I did a MO smash and it was a pale golden color, but other recipes I've seen, it appears MO should give a dark wort. I'm wondering if I get sent the wrong grains and didn't realize it being my first time using MO.
 
Ditto if you are soaking?

What color was this?

I did a MO smash and it was a pale golden color, but other recipes I've seen, it appears MO should give a dark wort. I'm wondering if I get sent the wrong grains and didn't realize it being my first time using MO.

Maris Otter is a pale malt. Certain maltsters (glen eagles, for instance) make it slightly darker, but most MO is 3-5 SRM...just a touch darker than American 2-row. It should not produce "dark" wort. Bobby says his was 14srm, which is dark amber to brown, but that's because there's twenty-eight freaking pounds in 5 gallons!
 
Though I am completely full of myself, I really only added the (awards) thing because of the whole discussion about trusting recipes, etc. I'd probably take a chance on a recipe with at least some BJCP recognition.

Yeah, Marris Otter is pale, maybe a bit darker than regular 2-row, but it adds up when you get into big bills like that. I think a lot of people add pounds of Special B and Crystal 120 thinking it's necessary to get a dark barleywine.

14 SRM is like the darker side of an ESB or lighter side of a brown ale.
 
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Curious what Bitterness system your beersmith/promash is set to? I never get IBU calculations to match anyone's posting. I use Beersmith. No matter if I'm set to Garetz, Tinseth, or Rager. Also Beersmith is tell me 28l;b MO in 5G gives me og of 1059. Curious what potential your MO is? Mine says 1038. I'm sure it has something to do with equipment setups and other options. I wish there was a setup wizard :)

i really need to hone my Beersmith setup down to fit the recipes on here cause I much prefer proven recipes over my experience with my own :cross:


*Edit* Noticed the 120Minute boil time.That puts me at 1169 with 55IBUs.....

I would just use your recipe and get what I get, but I'm trying to scale to a 3.5G batch
 
Curious what Bitterness system your beersmith/promash is set to? I never get IBU calculations to match anyone's posting. I use Beersmith. No matter if I'm set to Garetz, Tinseth, or Rager. Also Beersmith is tell me 28l;b MO in 5G gives me og of 1059. Curious what potential your MO is? Mine says 1038. I'm sure it has something to do with equipment setups and other options. I wish there was a setup wizard :)

i really need to hone my Beersmith setup down to fit the recipes on here cause I much prefer proven recipes over my experience with my own :cross:


*Edit* Noticed the 120Minute boil time.That puts me at 1169 with 55IBUs.....

I would just use your recipe and get what I get, but I'm trying to scale to a 3.5G batch
I noticed the same thing - but there is no sparge which results in a poorer brewhouse efficiency. Set your efficiency to something like 55 or 60% and it drops the OG estimate.
 
I wanted it to remain as English as possible so I had no intention of hops to be a focal point. If you go that route, I'd call it American and use Magnum/Chinook bittering with Amarillo finishing and Cascade dry hop. I'd dry hop in the secondary at the same time that it sits on oak.
 
Hi Bobby

Doing my first barleywine this weekend. In your recipe description, you say it'd be nicer if it was a little less abv. If you were going to do it again, would you omit the surcose, or does that need to be there to help the yeast attenuate? I've got 29# in mine right now, going to pitch two packets of rehydrated S-05, unless someone suggestes otherwise. My LHBS doesnt have Wyeast 9093 in stock right now. The farther away HBS has WLP099, but i'm not sure I like the description about esters being present with high abv..
 
It's hard for me to know how much attenuation you'll get out of two packs of US05 since I pitched mine on a huge cake from a previous batch. I honestly thought it was going to quite at about 1.030 but it kept going down to 1.024 if I recall (whatever 13% would be because I remember that number specifically).

I think it would be reasonable follow my recipe and see where it ends up with the two packs of yeast. You can opt to hold the sucrose back for now and see how the ferment progresses. If you want to, you can later dissolve the sugar in a bit of water, boil, cool and feed the primary.
 
I think it would be reasonable follow my recipe and see where it ends up with the two packs of yeast. You can opt to hold the sucrose back for now and see how the ferment progresses. If you want to, you can later dissolve the sugar in a bit of water, boil, cool and feed the primary.

What I meant to ask was why did you include sugar in the first place? I see many of the other Barleywine recipes have 1#. Is it normal for the style? Did you want more ABV? Did you initially think it would help the yeast work harder? Did you want it a little drier, even after the 149 deg 75 min mash?
 
This has been added to my list of huge brews to do. On deck are a 1.1 wheat wine and this... I've been all about the big beers lately.

Not sure if I'll make it to the LHBS before I brew this - any thoughts on what to do with the small beer if my in stock grains are Crystal 10, Vienna, MO and 2 row? Might home roast some grain...
 
The sugar was added to make sure it finished dry enough. If I were pitching on a yeast cake again, I'd leave it out.

The second runnings beer I did used a pound of crystal 80 into the mash right before sparging. Frankly, it could have been kettle steeped but my hope was that I'd get a slight bit more conversion by letting it sit in there with the sparge for 15 minutes. Maybe it worked.

I wouldn't cap the mash with a base grain though. I'd just throw the Crystal 10L in there. You'll still end up with an Special Bitter but it might be a touch lighter in color like a summer bitter. An ounce of black malt or carafa would color it up.
 
How did this end up tasting with some time on it?

I have a very similar recipe ready to go for an 18 gallon batch, but before I use up 80 pounds of Maris Otter I would like to hear your experience. I am also planning on using EKG but at about 80 IBU and Wyeast 1056. I plan to utilize kettle caramelization for character and color.

I am also planning to use table sugar to help cut through this 1.120 monster. I expect it will be pretty dark by the time it is done boiling.
 
The last few tastes I've had of this happened in the Spring of 2010. I filled 8 bottles off the keg 6 months earlier. It took gold in the NHC Northeast regional but nothing in the big show. The last two bottles were a treat but I think they started showing some signs of oxidation at that point but it didn't ruin it by any means. You wouldn't even know I used any hops in it after the long aging and maybe a touch more would be nice. For 13% ABV, it was very smooth.

I think kettle carmelization would be a good idea if you wanted to stick to the SMASH concept.

I attempted to repeat this recipe last year and failed miserably with a Brett infection I THINK came from mixing up my clean/sour autosiphons. boooo
 
I attempted to repeat this recipe last year and failed miserably with a Brett infection I THINK came from mixing up my clean/sour autosiphons. boooo

Oh that is sad.

Thanks for the info. From your experience with its drop to the Gravity cellar due to the 1056 and the sugar, I am going to adjust mine by removing all sugar and bumping the mash temp. I am using some 1056 cropped today at a local brewery. I will have as much as I need and will have to run some calculations to determine pitching rate. I am planning to do a first wort hopping with Magnum or some such hop and than use EKGs to finish. My since from what you are saying is that the finishing hops are less then significant after aging, which is what I am assuming will happen, but they still probably give some texture to the character of the brew.

Thanks for the response.
 
I'm using BrewTarget and my numbers are coming out way different. I've never done a brew this big before, are the inconsistencies just what happens at the extreme edges of brewing?

If I put in 28lbs of Marris Otter @ 60% eff, I get an OG of 1136, and a FG of 1.034. It also warns that the beer will be cloyingly sweet and I get nowhere nere 62 IBUs.

I'm guessing I should ignore the software and go full ahead with your numbers? Thoughts?
 
I'm going to be brewing this tomorrow. It will be my first barleywine and my first partigyle brew. I have to make some adjustments though because I can't fit 28 lbs of grain in my mash tun. Still working on those. Hopefully I will remember to report back in a few month with how it is going!
 
I brewed this on 12/24/11, It was a hell of a brew day.
Mash just fit into 48Qt. Coleman, but when I closed the lid it squirted out the sides.
Hit all my temps and had a 53% Efficiency for the Barley Wine. With 1# of Belgian candy my OG was 1.114 and IBU's around 61. I changed a few things to make this my own, and fit into English Barley Wine Catagory. Plan on Oaking half and keeping the other half un- Oaked for comps. Thanks for the base recipe bobby. Cant wait to try this
 
Thoughts on replacing marris otter with breiss 2 row? Thats what I have.... debating on this or water into barleywine recipe
 
Brewed this on the 6th, used 32 lbs of us 2 row instead. Let it ferment out and tastes it. Little too wet, so I added the pound of sugar. Transferred it to a corny for long term storage till December. Frigging tasty! Can't wait.

Only hiccup is I cold crashed it and it sucked in a quart of sanitized water/blow off back into the fermenter. Hopefully at 13.8% alcohol it will kill anything that made it in
 
So I ran into a slight problem with this beer, SWMBO. Apparently making a bunch of noise at midnight trying to get the barelywine finished was too much so I ended up keeping the sparged beer (some 80 Crystal as suggested) in a cooler for a day and a half. It seemed okay and everything went smooth, but somewhere in the process of that second beer it soured. So now I got a sour ESB or something like that. Very drinkable though. Carbing up in a keg now.

As for the barleywine, wow!
 
Small update. Going to take the sour ESB off the gas and put it in a secondary on top of some cherries for a few months.
 
Caramelization of the wort plus raising the OG me thinks. Its setup as no sparge so there is quite a large efficiency drop.

This has been sitting in a sealed keg in my closet since June. Bottling is in December, drinking is next June on my birthday. Can't wait. It was tasty when it went into the keg.
 
Thoughts on this barleywine recipe? I have the boil volume so high because I am planning on a lot of hop loss and 120 minute boil at 5% boil off rate.

Let me know if you would tweak the malt percentages at all.

Planning to bitter with Nugget, flavor and flame out additions of a blend of nugget/chinook/cascade/columbus

Planning to innoculate different carboys with WLP090, WLP001, WLP007, WLP023.

image-3411610635.jpg
 
Bobby, do you think this much grain/water would fit into a 10 gallon round Rubbermaid cooler or is this a little too ambitious for my setup?
 
No it won't. 25 pounds is a realistic max for 10gallon tun. You'll use about 7.5 gallons of strike water but only get 5 gallons to drain out. You might consider putting a bowl or pot on top of the grain bed and pushing down with some force to squeeze as much high gravity wort out (as long as you're not crushing a false bottom or something). You can still throw another 3 gallons of sparge water in, stir and drain. It may not be quite as high in gravity, but figuring in the 2 hour boil and sugar addition will get you close. You can also add a bit more table sugar or even a pound of DME to punch it.
 

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