So my Birthday was Thursday, and on Saturday my friends, many of who were involved with the barleywine came together to celebrate with me. Many folks there were beer judges and homebrewers.
Many of you might not have heard (I think the thread about it was in the secret members only part) but in February I lost half of what I owned, including all my brewing gear to an apartment fire.
Luckily only about two weeks before in anticipation of bottling it for the final 6 months I brought the oak barrel where the beer had been aging for the last 2+ years up from the basement store room, where it had been hiding on a dolly on the floor, under some shelves. Had I not, the barrel would have been under 4 feet of dirty fire house water and the beer would have been ruined.
My friend Bill grabbed the barrel and stored it at his place. But with life we did not get to bottle age it like I had planned. We only got it bottled a month ago.
The barrel was the fourth racking in 5 year, it sat in primary IIRC for a month, then racked to a secondary and was re-yeasted to bring it further down, then racked to glass to get it off all the yeast trub, and sat I think for a year in the tertiary before I secured the barrel.
I'm not sure how much went into the barrel, probably about 4 gallons. I would say over the years I probably pulled maybe a half gallon of samples, I tried to be good... and really don't think it was more than that.
So it was much to our surprise that there was only about 1.5 gallons in the barrel! A lot of evaporation/angel's share/concentration happened in those years.
Bill and I made a snap decision to bring the volume up to 2 gallons with 1/2 gallon of distilled water.
After diluting it with the water we took a gravity reading and much to our surprise it came out to a whopping 19.75%.
We added Dantsar CBC-1 bottling yeast and went ahead and bottling, getting sadly only 22 bottles.
On Tuesday Bill came by with a bottle of it for us to taste before the party.
So on Saturday, after dinner (I sous-vided a 10 pound leg of lamb) we cracked open 5 precious bottle of it to share with the guests.
It has no carbonation, but it has so much depth going for it. I can't even describe the complexity of the aromas and flavors in there, cocoa, tobacco, vanilla, dark fruits, marshmallow, toffee, burnt sugar, almonds, hazelnuts, sherry....on and on and on.
It's not a beer, it has legs so thick it's more like a spirit, like a brandy.
Everyone, beer geeks and non beer geeks raved about it.
I hope some of the folks who were there, who might be on here can tell what they thought about it.
I am quite satisfied and proud of what we pulled off making it.
Now I have to seal each bottle in a little crate or something to keep me from drinking them all down.
