BARLEY WINE recipe critique!

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beargrylls

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Hello fellow brewers,
I am brewing a barley wine this week and have been looking at a bunch of recipes, while sort of formulating my own from what I have seen. The problem is, I have never brewed a BW and have not used many of the ingredients I am planning to buy, so I'm not sure if the combination of ingredients will work out as I intend. I am buying the grains tomorrow, so please give me feedback! Thanks!

3 GALLONS- 70% efficiency
7 lbs pale 2 row american
2 lbs Munich
1 lb flaked rye
6 oz Special B
6 oz C80
1 lb cane or brown sugar

1 oz centennial 10% 60 min
0.5 oz centennial 20 min
0.5 oz cascade 7% 15 min
0.5 oz cascade 5 min
0.5 oz cascade 0 min

Specifically I'm wondering if the C80 is needed. I want to keep the special B but Im not sure of the amount and whether to also include the C80.
 
I think you'll be okay either way. When I made a barley wine this winter, I used some Special B (.25lbs for a 5 gallon batch) and some C60 (.75 lbs) and was very pleased with the result (though I haven't tasted a finished one yet--just gravity samples at bottling time).

I suppose it depends a bit on the flavor profile you want. Sticking with less Special B and more 40L/60L/Munich will keep your profile truly "malty." Special B and C80 will tend to add to caramel, burnt sugar, roasty and dried fruit flavors. You might want that, or you might think it muddies what is supposed to be a vehicle to show off malt. (It is, after all, possible to make a BW SMaSH.) Just depends on what you want to make.

In that vein, you might consider swapping out the American pale 2-row for something British. I think the touch of class is helpful, and BW is "supposed" to be malty.
 
i think i might switch the c80 to c60 or even c40 then. it probably wont make a huge difference, but from what i understand, special b is just a really dark crystal malt, so pairing it with another dark crystal malt might not make alot of sense.
 
alright here's the final (as of now) grain bill:

7.5 lbs Maris Otter
2.5 lbs Munich
1 lb flaked rye
4 oz Special B
8 oz C60
0.5 lb cane or brown sugar

any last thoughts?
 
ok, if there's anyone still listening out there, what about this:

all cascade and northern brewer hop schedule.
I have 0.5 oz of NB and a ton of cascade.
maybe bittering with cascade and putting in NB around 15-5 min to get some mintyness?
 
That grain bill looks good to me. I think I'd just use cane sugar, and you can consider upping it to a pound if you want to boost the gravity. Add it, boiled in a small amount of water and cooled, at high krauesen (works better for yeast metabolism).

If you plan to age the beer for a long time (which is typical for barley wines), the hops will definitely get muted. If you want some hop character after six months, make sure you're using enough to get the point across. I'm personally not sure that NB as a flavor hop would work with my idea of what BW should taste like. But it's your beer!
 
why is adding the cane sugar at high krausen better for the yeast?

When I was listening to podcast from Jamil, they talked about how the yeast will target maltotriose in the initial part of the fermentation and adding simple sugars later would stress the yeast less. They talked about how yeast always go for the simplest sugars first and maltotriose is a complex chain sugar the yeast have to break down. If they are given both at the same time, they will go after simple and possibly have trouble switching metabolism in a higher alcohol environment. I tried it in several Belgian beers with great success so using that same thought pattern with the Barleywine would I think prevent a stalled fermentation.
 
ok so one last question. my hop schedule now looks like:

1 oz centennial 9.8% 60 min
0.25 oz cascade 7% 60 min
0.5 oz centennial 20 min
0.5 oz cascade 5 min
0.5 oz cascade 0 min
0.5 centennial 0 min

this gives me 87.5 IBUs
is that appropriate considering the grain bill? i want it to be noticeably hoppy but not into the IIPA range. i also want the malt to still come through as the primary taste, so is this going to be too many hops?
 
When I was listening to podcast from Jamil, they talked about how the yeast will target maltotriose in the initial part of the fermentation and adding simple sugars later would stress the yeast less. They talked about how yeast always go for the simplest sugars first and maltotriose is a complex chain sugar the yeast have to break down. If they are given both at the same time, they will go after simple and possibly have trouble switching metabolism in a higher alcohol environment. I tried it in several Belgian beers with great success so using that same thought pattern with the Barleywine would I think prevent a stalled fermentation.

ahh ok that makes sense. catabolite repression and all that :)
 
I think you will be happy with that hop combination. I use that same combo for my Victory Old Horizontal clone only a little different schedule. Makes a fine American Barleywine.
 
Yeah I agree, that looks like a good hop schedule. Bearing in mind that the hops will fade--especially aroma--after some aging, and the bitterness will decrease, and you'll have a very high FG, I think you'll have a good malt character but still have some hop presence.
 
recipe seems unnecessarily complex

why add the sugar at all? if it's to dry the beer out, i'd prefer just mashing lower and choosing a more efficient yeast strain

as far as the %s of special B and c80 - those are, in my opinion, a bit high, but you may like your barleywine like that.

what is the reasoning behind the rye?
 
i like rye beers and i saw a barleywine recipe on here with some flaked rye, so i figured i'd try it. I also came to the same conclusion about the sugar, and I decided to just up the MO to 8.5 lbs. if i need the sugar i can put it in later.

i also decided on 6 oz c60 and 4 oz special b, which is only 5.2% crystal malts.

what temp would you recommend mashing at? i was thinking of starting at 150 and letting it drop from there for 75 min
 
Yeah I wouldn't mash higher than 152F, certainly, given your target OG (and resulting very high FG). 150F for 75 minutes sounds good to me. There's no way that your final wort will be insufficiently viscous.
 
150 should be fine. it has a lot to do with your yeast selection. for barleywine, i have used s04 and s05 and wyeast strains scottish ale and american ale II yeasts.

i got very good attenuation from all but the AAII. the scottish ale yeast was a complete monster (1.118 to 1.011!), so i'd probably back off of my 148 temp for that one in the future! with that particular one, i had added agave during high krausen several times, and i've found that this kind of addition (like what you are planning with sugar) tends to dry the beer out even further. every time i've tried this, a control batch with no post-kettle additions actually finishes at a higher gravity than the one with a now greater OG. pretty interesting how yeast work.

the most important things for getting a beer like this to attenuate (and you do want it to attenuate - even when dry, the dark fruit and other flavors in barleywine come through appropriately) are pitching a crapload of yeast and giving them a healthy start.
 
i'm mashing right now at 150, and i'm planning on pitching onto a s05 yeast cake of an irish red that i bottled today. im figuring this will be plenty of yeast, and probably more than i could get by making a 1 or 2 liter starter. If i could get it down to around 1.025, that would be fine with me
wow 1.118 to 1.011...14%? thats insane. how did that one turn out?
 
be careful pitching onto cakes! this can easily lead to extreme overpitching, which can develop a lot of green apple and booze in your beer. i'm not an expert on this but people always seem to warn against it.

the gravity sample of the agave BW was pretty good - not nearly as hot as you'd expect for a month-old beer of that size. i'd used a greater % agave in my gallon test batch, and i might have gone too low for this one, but i still get some interesting candied orange/marmelade from the agave. it's sitting on some bourbon-soaked oak cubes right now!
 
mmmm that sounds delicious. i dont have a huge yeast cake, its sort of like a half inch up in the bottom of a 6 gallon carboy. should i pour some out?
 
If you have time tonight while you're waiting for the boil, cooling, etc. you could pour in some sterile water, swish it around to loosen everything, and pour into a sanitized container, then pour off the water and top layer (which is probably trub), and then use the remaining yeast. That's what Gordon Strong recommends. This also lets you clean out your carboy before pouring in the BW wort, which is probably a good thing.

I don't know much personally about overpitching, and I don't have my copy of _Yeast_ on me (I'm at work), but for a BW it's advantageous to have a lot of yeast. So if you do the decant/rinse method, I bet you'll still be okay. But I guess I can't say for sure.
 
i ended up pouring the yeast cake into a sanitized measuring cup, and it measured 250 ml of yeast/trub. i pitched the whole thing into my wort, bc it wasnt a huge cake and i figured a little too much yeast is better than not enough yeast.

also, on another note, i missed my target gravity by 27 points. i think this was due to efficiency, as i had my recipe calc set to 68% but only got about 56% or so. this is going to bring me to 8.4% if it finished at 1.021. if it finishes higher, is there anything wrong with putting in some sugar after fermentation finishes? or is high krausen the best time? i kind of want to wait to see what the FG is bc i dont want the sugar to dry it out too much
 
gravity on bigger batches is tough to hit. i've found that the best way to help get me there is pretty vigorous mixing and recirculating a few times. i don't have a pump so i manually drain off the mash and pour it back in a few times. this helps a lot, particularly with beers like BW and RIS.

good luck!
 
Yeah, it's hard to get the last sugar out without being massively over volume on the wort. You can sort of fix this by making a smaller amount of high gravity beer and a larger amount of lower-gravity beer (that is, parti-gyle).

You can definitely add sugar at high krausen. You can also go get some malt extract, boil it for ten minutes in a small quantity of water, and then add that to the carboy. That will keep the body and flavor profile relatively more similar.
 
i actually did make a small beer from the rest of the grain. i figured i would have a bunch of sugar left so i sparged some more and got a little less than 2 gallons of 1.031 wort.

i ended up boiling for more than 2.5 hours and still only got 1.084, but if i had boiled for another half hour or so, i think i could have gotten much closer to my target gravity, but with about 2.5 gal instead of 3. i hit 3 gallons right on the nose after the boil. anyway, the sample tasted like syrup with hops

recirculating sounds like a good idea, i will try that next time. i also noticed that when i was cleaining out my cooler mash tun, the braided metal hose had drifted up from the bottom into the middle portion of the mash tun. i guess this was when i was stirring and it didnt settle back down bc the mash was so thick. im guessing this had something to do with my low efficiency as well
 
i think i might switch the c80 to c60 or even c40 then. it probably wont make a huge difference, but from what i understand, special b is just a really dark crystal malt, so pairing it with another dark crystal malt might not make alot of sense.

I've used 12 oz in a 5 gallon batch of special B and it turned out great. It gives the beer some nice subtle cherry tones.
 
I've used 12 oz in a 5 gallon batch of special B and it turned out great. It gives the beer some nice subtle cherry tones.

the barleywine was the first time i used special b. chewed some up before i mashed in and it was great, tasted like raisins and brown sugar. cant wait to see what it tastes like in the finished beer. hope i used enough!
 
ok so i just sampled this after about 3 weeks and its not bad. i didnt not add any sugar. the fg ended pretty low, 1.016. came out to 8.9%. it's strange though, this tastes pretty sweet even at 1.016.

it is a bit bitter, but im guessing that will fade a little with some aging. im thinking about bottling half of it and aging the other half on some oak chips
 
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