Insane Barleywine/ Utopia clone.

I have brewed 4 beers with SGs of over 1.120, three RIS and a Barleywine that is sitting in secondary. Now I'm thinking I want to brew a true monster. I've read the threads here and a couple of other sites and a few of the comments festered in to a plan. Based on Way, way, way over the top Sam Adams Utopia clone and scaling down to 5 gallons to the bottle, and using my 30 gallon boil kettle and a couple of 10 gallon mash tuns.

If it takes 7 gallons of wort to produce 5 gallons to bottle, that 7 gallons will have 32.75 pounds of sugar to achieve as SG of 1.234. Some of that can come from maple syrup 1.40 pound from 2 pounds of syrup.

This is what I'm thinking, boil down to to around 1.100 take 7 gallons and add to my keggle, to that I would add the hops to and boil down to 5.5 gallons. I use a hop spider so I don't loose much wort and I transfer 5 gallons in to that would give me a SG of 1.130 and 14 pounds of sugar

32.75 total
-01.40 maple syrup
-14.00 first batch
21.85 pounds remaining

That means that the remaining wort is boiled till it reaches a gravity of 1.590 or till there is 3 gallons which ever comes first, that would be canned in quart mason jars for use later. For reference maple syrup is at least 1.660

This would give me 22 pounds of sugar in 12 jars, when the beer fell in gravity I could hit the jO2, pour it in and and keep feeding until the yeast stalled. If adding the maple syrup didn't get it going I would be done.

This would allow me to stop with a final gravity closer to 1.025 if the yeast could not handle the wort. Having a few jars of thick wort can not be a bad thing. I should be able to do this without the yeast ever seeing a SG of over 1.130.

View attachment ImageUploadedByHome Brew1487374705.899011.jpg
Will look at reducing the hops some.

Do it! I'm interested in the results.

Following.

Change of plans, not going to brew a "starter" beer. I've decided to treat this like a normal large beer only more so. I will create one liter starter with the WL099 and then step that to a two litter, then step that in to 2 two liter starters. I have a stir plate and am pretty sure I can borrow one. I will feed the wort a 2 liter batch and half the other batch. I'll go ahead and run the remaining starter though another cycle using second runnings instead of DME, then I can add that to the wort 24 hours later with another burst of O2 and the first of the quarts of concentrated wort.

My standard procedure for starters is to cold crash decant the beer and ad the yeast to the next flask. I did a 10 gallon batch of an Imperial Blue Moon clone that I triple stepped, blow off hose was active in 4 hours, so I'm not worried about under pitching this.

I also have a pack of CBC-1 ready, and two different champagne yeasts, to help bring it home.

Another option would be a double or triple mash where you take half of the grain, mash and sparge and then use the wort for you second mash. You empty the mash ton after first sparge then add second half of grains(you may need more water for the sparge). This was done by John Blichman as an experiment to see if his grain father could brew a really big beer (link below).
http://www.thebrewingnetwork.com/brew-strong-triple-mashing/

My fall back is to mash all the grain in a 120 quart cooler over night and use my mash tun to pull the wort. If I do that I will separate the first, second and third runnings and blend to get my numbers and look at doing a parti-gyle with the third runnings and left over seconds.
I figure if I mash in around 2200 and correct temp around 2400, I should get pretty good conversation.

I found a secret ingredient, reading about high gravity yeasts I learned two things. One our brothers that distill after they have fermented don't care for them. The second thing I learned was that they can use liquid enzymes to convert corn with out malting it, or using malted barley. I've ordered a starter set and will use it for the the mash. Since brewers care about mouthfeel and distillers care about getting as much conversion as possible, this looks like a great time to borrow from their play book.