Big Old Ale - SG of 1.21. Thoughts?

Hey Everyone,

I am looking at brewing a Big beer with a SG of 1.21 (recipe below). Ive done allot of research into how I will make this beer actually work and I have come up with the process below.

I will make a 1.5 gallon yeast starter @ 1.045 with two vials of WLP099 High gravity yeast. I will make my yeast starter in my 6.5 gallons carboy primary fermenter a week before brew day.

My planned batch size for this beer is 4.5 gallons with a 150 minute boil time. Reason for the long boil is I want to rinse the grains as much as I can to make sure i can extract ALL the sugars possible. My normal efficiency is around 80%, but with this beer I am planning for 70%. With that said I will boil down my wort from 8 gallons to 4.5, chill to 68 degrees and then siphon the wort into a plastic fermenter with volume markings on the side. From there I will then siphon approximately 2.0 gallons of wort onto the yeast cake in the primary fermenter. I will give it a good shake once the wort has been added. I will then add pure O2 with a carb stone.

I will then siphon off the remaining 2.5 gallons of wort out of the bucket and into sanitized 1/2 gallon glass mason jars. Once the fermentation reaches high krausen in the primary I will then begin to add one glass jar per day into the primary. After the last jar is added I will then let it ferment for a month (or longer if needed), keg at 1.75 vols and age in keg for 3 weeks in keg, bottle and let the beer age for a minimum of 6 months.

My biggest concern in making this beer is reaching a reasonable FG. I will be happy if my beer reaches anywhere near 1.040. To make this happen I do plan to add yeast nutrient to the yeast starter and boil, but my biggest question has to do with O2. How long would you oxygenate the wort for with a beer this big? I was thinking like 3 to 5 minutes? Also when I add wort from the mason jars would it make more sense to oxygenate the wort in the jar itself before adding it into the primary or would I just oxygenate the primary each time I add a jar?

Any comments, feedback, experience would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers!

English Old Ale
Eff - 70%
Boil Time - 150 minutes
IBU - 79
Est ABV - 23%
Est FG 1.034

Malt
22.0 lbs - Marris Otter
3.0 lbs 2 oz - Munich (10L)
0.75 lbs - Crystal 40
4oz - Chocolate malt
2.5 lbs - Dry Malt Extract
3.5 lbs - Dextrose

Hops
3.5 oz Northdown Hops - 90 minutes
1.5 oz North down Hops - 5 minutes

Yeast
2 vials - WLP099 High Gravity Yeast

Subd. I'd love to give something like this a try.

with something that big I would make sure you are checking your ABV to IBU ratio.

mucci2k said:

with something that big I would make sure you are checking your ABV to IBU ratio.

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Currently its at 79/210 = 0.376. Maybe it should be a little higher, closer to 0.6?

A lower mash temp will give you a more fermentable wort, which will result in a lower FG.

Oxygenating for 3-5 minutes sounds about right, although I would guess that 3 is probably closer to what you actually need. From what I understand, it is nearly impossible to over-oxygenate at a homebrew scale, so I think that range is appropriate.

Another thing you may want to try is cooling the wort as much as possible before you oxygenate, since oxygen dissolves more easily into wort at lower temperatues.

rwing7486 said:

Currently its at 79/210 = 0.376. Maybe it should be a little higher, closer to 0.6?

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Depends what you are going for. At that ratio, it is going to be very malty. Personally, I wouldn't even consider anything under .5, and I would probably go closer to 1.0, but I like hoppy beers.

douglasbarbin said:

Depends what you are going for. At that ratio, it is going to be very malty. Personally, I wouldn't even consider anything under .5, and I would probably go closer to 1.0, but I like hoppy beers.

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Ya I was thinking the same thing....it all depends on where my FG ends up. I might start with 0.75 and see where that takes me with this first batch and then adjust from there. Was looking to use english hops, might try using Target hops for bittering and then north down for aroma.

I pulled this from homebrewmanual.com(not sure If i need to reference)

It should give you a general idea of where you should be based on the style you are going for.

Sounds similar to this: http://byo.com/boiling/item/51-21-alcohol-all-grain-beer


I would second mashing pretty low / possibly long as you'll want all the help you can get in this respect / there's no worries of "drying" this beer out.

blizz81 said:

Sounds similar to this: http://byo.com/boiling/item/51-21-alcohol-all-grain-beer


I would second mashing pretty low / possibly long as you'll want all the help you can get in this respect / there's no worries of "drying" this beer out.

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Ya was planning on mashing around 150. I also used that same article as a guidline when writing my recipe

another thought I had to avoid having the beer being too "syrupy" is to set my 4.5 gallons recipe at a SG 1.182 and then boil 7 lbs of corn sugar in 1 gallon of water and split it into two 1/2 gallon mason jars and add 1 jar at high kraused and the 2nd jar a day later and then let the beer ferment for a month.

The reason for the corn sugar is this should help the FG drop and dry the beer out to avoid that "syrupy" texture and flavor with beers this big. Also the reason I want to do 7lbs in 1 gallon of water is this will have a gravity of 1.3405. Adding that to 4.5 gallons of the wort gravity of 1.182 should boost the overall SG up to 1.21 - which is my target SG (if my math is correct). I want to call this beer 1.21 Giggawatts

Sounds like quite a thing, after my own big-beer'd heart.


I just recently mashed my RIS recreation that ended up at 1.122 at 147*F. Wish I would have done our barleywine in January lower, I think we did that at 150 or 151.

blizz81 said:

Sounds like quite a thing, after my own big-beer'd heart.


I just recently mashed my RIS recreation that ended up at 1.122 at 147*F. Wish I would have done our barleywine in January lower, I think we did that at 150 or 151.

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really.....how long you mash for? I was thinking of mashing mine overnight in my igloo cooler at 150ish and would expect the temp to drop a few degrees over night.

rwing7486 said:

really.....how long you mash for? I was thinking of mashing mine overnight in my igloo cooler at 150ish and would expect the temp to drop a few degrees over night.

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That's a fine idea. Sorry if you already said that earlier as I didn't go back and re-read.


I have an aggressive crush and RIMS - still mashed for 75min on the RIS.

Yeah I would start the mash as low as you can. 148F probably. And I would cut the crystal malt too. You need to do everything you can to get the FG as low as possible. The sugar is a good idea for sure. You could also consider adding Brett if the FG doesn't get low enough for you. That would actually fit the Old Ale style nicely. Or some beano or another enzyme like they added in that article.

As for the BU:GU ratio, it's actually not chemically possible to get more than about 80-100 IBUs worth of iso-alpha acids to dissolve into a beer. So even though it may say 200 IBU on paper, the actual beer can only physically have about 80-100 IBU. So there's not much point in adding more bittering hops once you get above the 80-100 IBU mark. You can always add more hop flavor and aroma though. No upper limit that I'm aware of for that.

And for your efficiency, I would definitely keep some extra DME on hand. I just did a 1.115 OG RIS and got 9 points lower (75% to 66%) than I usually do. So I can only imagine efficiency will drop exponentially as OG increases.

And I think it is possible to over oxygenate when you're using pure O2. I would think it would be much easier to do it on a homebrew scale compared to a commercial scale. I don't know much about using pure O2 though so I couldn't tell you how long to go.

Also, I love the Back to the Future inspired name! Good luck with it!

peterj said:

Yeah I would start the mash as low as you can. 148F probably. And I would cut the crystal malt too. You need to do everything you can to get the FG as low as possible. The sugar is a good idea for sure. You could also consider adding Brett if the FG doesn't get low enough for you. That would actually fit the Old Ale style nicely. Or some beano or another enzyme like they added in that article.

As for the BU:GU ratio, it's actually not chemically possible to get more than about 80-100 IBUs worth of iso-alpha acids to dissolve into a beer. So even though it may say 200 IBU on paper, the actual beer can only physically have about 80-100 IBU. So there's not much point in adding more bittering hops once you get above the 80-100 IBU mark. You can always add more hop flavor and aroma though. No upper limit that I'm aware of for that.

And for your efficiency, I would definitely keep some extra DME on hand. I just did a 1.115 OG RIS and got 9 points lower (75% to 66%) than I usually do. So I can only imagine efficiency will drop exponentially as OG increases.

And I think it is possible to over oxygenate when you're using pure O2. I would think it would be much easier to do it on a homebrew scale compared to a commercial scale. I don't know much about using pure O2 though so I couldn't tell you how long to go.

Also, I love the Back to the Future inspired name! Good luck with it!

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Thanks for the input! Have you used beano before but doesnt that reduce the body of the beer?

rwing7486 said:

Thanks for the input! Have you used beano before but doesnt that reduce the body of the beer?

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No, I've never used it. But it's active ingredient is an enzyme that breaks down complex carbohydrates which is what you would want if you were left with a high FG from too many unfermentables in the beer. If this is the case then there would be too much body in the beer and you would want to reduce it. I don't really know how far it would keep working though (or if it would work at all), so it could possibly take it too low and give you a thin beer. That would maybe be a last resort in my mind.

peterj said:

No, I've never used it. But it's active ingredient is an enzyme that breaks down complex carbohydrates which is what you would want if you were left with a high FG from too many unfermentables in the beer. If this is the case then there would be too much body in the beer and you would want to reduce it. I don't really know how far it would keep working though (or if it would work at all), so it could possibly take it too low and give you a thin beer. That would maybe be a last resort in my mind.

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Can you add the beano anytime?

peterj said:

Yeah I would start the mash as low as you can. 148F probably. And I would cut the crystal malt too. You need to do everything you can to get the FG as low as possible.

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There is a study done here on HBT. Turns out, especially if mashed, crystal malts are more fermentable than we generally assume. Dependent more on degree of roast.

If you are going to end up adding DME anyway, I don't know I would go through all of the extra work to recover max sugars from the grain. I would probably do my standard sparge, and adjust to my desired OG with DME.

broadbill said:

If you are going to end up adding DME anyway, I don't know I would go through all of the extra work to recover max sugars from the grain. I would probably do my standard sparge, and adjust to my desired OG with DME.

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Good point. I have plenty of DME on hand. After some reading I might just add all my corn sugar to the boil as well as i think for 1 gallon of water the max solubility of glucose is 1.11, which is no where near the 1.34 i was shooting for.

rwing7486 said:

Can you add the beano anytime?

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Not sure, but I bet you could find someone who has used it and posted something online about it. Just google it.

GilaMinumBeer said:

There is a study done here on HBT. Turns out, especially if mashed, crystal malts are more fermentable than we generally assume. Dependent more on degree of roast.

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Oh really? That sounds pretty interesting, do you have a link for it? I guess 3/4 pound of crystal wouldn't make much difference anyway.

rwing7486 said:

Good point. I have plenty of DME on hand. After some reading I might just add all my corn sugar to the boil as well as i think for 1 gallon of water the max solubility of glucose is 1.11, which is no where near the 1.34 i was shooting for.

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That doesn't sound right. You can dissolve A LOT of sugar into water. And I would hold off on the simple sugar addition until later on in fermentation. It's better for the yeast that way.

peterj said:

Not sure, but I bet you could find someone who has used it and posted something online about it. Just google it.



Oh really? That sounds pretty interesting, do you have a link for it? I guess 3/4 pound of crystal wouldn't make much difference anyway.



That doesn't sound right. You can dissolve A LOT of sugar into water. And I would hold off on the simple sugar addition until later on in fermentation. It's better for the yeast that way.

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Ya i miss calculated form the chart I saw. looks like 16lbs/ gallon which means about 1.6 ish

Update: Just about to add my last 1/2 gallon of dextrose to the fermenter. So far the yeast has kept up with the high gravity. Super excited to see how this beer turns out. I did switch up the Hops with using 3 ounces of warrior for bittering at 60 minutes and my finishing hops i used Challenger and EK Goldings. After primary fermentation is complete I do plan to rack about 1 gallon into a second fermenter and will age it on bourbon soaked Hungarian medium toast cubes for 30 days.

Following. The two old British brewing practices you might want to consider are Brett aging and using invert sugar syrup. PS: for the next batch!

JKaranka said:

Following. The two old British brewing practices you might want to consider are Brett aging and using invert sugar syrup. PS: for the next batch!

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I know. My brewing buddy had an idea of adding some brett cultures into a 1 gallon fermenter to see how it turned out, but we decided to add 1/2 ounce of bourbon soaked cubes instead to a 1 gallon fermenter.

Just an update on this beer. It's been 150 days since the last corn sugar addition the the primary. The beer finished at 1.054 with an estimated ABV of 19%. The tasting notes are sweet with a hint of cherry flavor with a nice alcohol warmth. I plan to keg this in the upcoming days with about 3psi (1.6 vols) and let age a month in the keg before i bottle. Final results to follow in the upcoming winter months

Did this turn out well? How'd it age?

zippybasher said:

Did this turn out well? How'd it age?

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Too sweet for my liking but definitely a nice alcohol warmth. Next time i plan to do a smaller batch with a 2 hour boil to get the volume down to roughly 3.5 gallons. And instead of adding disovled corn sugar in water I plan to start the fermentation with only 2 gallons of wort and will add the remaining 1.5 gallons as the beer reaches high krausen. Hopefully this will yield better results and a lower FG. I also plan to mash at 146 instead of 148 as well.

Most likely get this recipe going again mid summer for that it is ready for next February.