SMaSH or Kitchen Sink for my first barleywine?

Pre-emptive tl;dr - Should I make my barleywine a SMaSH with a lot of maillard reactions in the boil or should I go full-on kitchen sink with a ton of different specialty grains?

My base malt is ~1.031 pppg Australian feed grain that's malted in a port city here in China. It's not bad, but it compares more to a plain 2-row than any "named" base malt.

I'm planning a ~3.5 gallon, ~12% American barleywine to pitch on part or all of the US-05 cake from the APA I'm currently fermenting. There will be some bulk aging in my underused carboy, possibly some oaking, definitely some dry hopping, and it'll be bottled and intended for consumption next winter. The single hop will be Calypso and I have about 5-6 ounces to split between the boil and the dry hop. I'm planning on a long boil and possibly concentration of a portion of the wort in a separate pot as well to get some big boilside Maillard reactions.

Now I'm torn between two vastly different philosophies on the malt bill. Part of me wants to SMaSH it with 7-8 kilos of base malt and let the Maillards in the boil and the big OG do most of the work. The other part of me wants to go full-on kitchen sink and use up a bunch of grains that I have in small (200-500g) quantities, dropping the base malt to ~60% bashing it with some or all of them: Special W, Caramunich III, CaraAmber, Wheat, Rye, Munich, and maybe even a pound or two of homemade mahogany candi syrup.

I know it's not prudent to make such a decision in advance, but aside from a willingness to cut out one or two of the kitchen sink grains (perhaps using only one or the other of the wheat and rye, for example), I really want to go all-or-nothing on this. What does everyone think?

Throw it all in! Dont have a reason but thats my advice

What is Special W?
I would leave out the caramunic III and load up on Munich, also use equal portions of wheat and rye. Absolutely do the sugar thing ,I can taste it already.

hottpeper13 said:

What is Special W?
I would leave out the caramunic III and load up on Munich, also use equal portions of wheat and rye. Absolutely do the sugar thing ,I can taste it already.

Click to expand...

Special W is Weyermann's equivalent of Special B, supposed to contribute a bit more raisin flavor than Special B but otherwise pretty much the same.

I'm still considering the kitchen sink method, but after doing some inventory it seems a bit less appealing. It turns out I've got 400g of Spec W, which is a lot for a batch this size, and the other non-roast grains I've got in quantities that would fit this beer are Caramunich III (200g), Carabelge (~200-300g), and Carapils (which I would probably hold onto for an IPA anyway). I could use up my last 700-1000g of Munich, but I use that in other beers anyway so I'd be replacing any Munich I use in this recipe, and I've got more wheat and rye and CaraAmber than I could use up in a brew like this, so adding any of them would be an option but wouldn't contribute to the inventory cleanout I was thinking about at first.

For the (probably nobody) who cares:

I ended up going almost SMaSH style with this - 7.85 kg 2-row to 500g oats (for body down the line). Because of time constraints, I started my mash around 67C at 6:30 AM and wasn't able to get home to start the boil until 1:15 PM, so the mash was almost seven hours long with no stirring. I mashed with 24L, then pulled the grain bag, put it in my nestled-buckets draining setup, and did some squeezing and sparging while the "first runnings" started boiling with 10g of Calypso for about 40-50 early IBUs of FWH (or so I thought - I need to recheck the IBUs against my actual final volume). As I sparged more of the painfully ugly wort (gray and cloudy - the local grain has a lot of protein and I grind my grains to the point of being about 30-40% flour), I added it into the kettle. Eventually, I had about 36L of wort split between my 35L kettle and a 12" frying pan where I was reducing wort on the side, adding wort as the volume reduced until I had added a total of about 5-6L into the pan.

Several times while I boiled, I used a 15cm strainer to strain out floating proteins for about 15 minutes at a time - skimming the scum off the top of both pots and then running it through the wort in the kettle until it was clogged with material, rinsing it off, and doing it again and again and again. I probably took out a liter, maybe liter and a half of scum in the process, but there was still a ton of break material at the end. At least there will be a little less trub in the primary.

Since I kept the flame relatively low under the frying pan, it was probably around the two and a half hour mark that its contents had been reduced to a syrup and were ready to be diluted with wort from the kettle and them returned to the kettle. It was thick, dark stuff at that point, and should provide quite a bit of character.

Around hour four of the boil, I was still around the 19 liter mark and my OG was already just a couple points under what I had intended for 13.5L into the fermenter (I might need to revisit my PPPG numbers for the local grain, but a big part was that I calculated for an efficiency drop-off from the large batch size, but after such a big sparge I don't think I actually lost any efficiency from my regular batches). I decided to make my final hop additions and get ready to call it a brewday. Added ~35g each of Calypso and Caliente, waited ten minutes and did it again, then waited three minutes (supposed to be five but I got impatient, haha), flameout and chill. I chilled to about 16C before tossing into a bucket with about half of the US-05 cake from the APA my buddy bottled while I was brewing this (part of his training - he and I brewed the APA together three weeks ago so he could learn about all-grain brewing), shaking the everloving crap out of it for several minutes to aerate, attaching a blowoff tube, and putting it in the chamber set to 16.2C in hopes that it won't start too fast.

All told, I went from about 36L (~9.5 gallons) of ugly, cloudy, grayish yellow wort to about 18L of beautiful, clear (save for a ton of break material that will flocc out of the finished beer), amber-colored wort.

tl;dr: Simple grainbill, two hops, high efficiency, LONG boil, beautiful color change (from both concentration and copious maillard reactions), still way more barleywine than I had bargained for.

To continue the updates for the exactly nobody who seems to care (might as well consider this thread my personal notes - it's much more detailed than my actual brew journal's entry on this beer, haha), I opened up the fermenter for the first time to take an SG last night. Lots of krausen marks all the way up to the lid of the bucket, but no more krausen. Interestingly, while there were no yeast rafts, there were a few dozen hops leaves floating at the top - while I dumped the whole kettle into the bucket and there was some leftover dry hop material in the half-cake I used, the hops I used were all pellets so it's suprising to see leaves as big as I saw floating.

Back on topic, the SG was down to about 3p from 24.5p for 12.4% ABV - pretty healthy fermentation I'd say, and there's an off chance it's not done yet. The sample was delicious even uncarbed, with a thick body (there's still a lot of sugar in there even at 3p) and quite a bit of booziness that balanced out the lack of carbonation and should significantly age out before next winter.

I'll give it another week or two in the bucket at the current 19.5-20C temps I'm holding and then probably rack it to my carboy for a few months of bulk aging prior to dry hopping and possibly oaking, to be bottled probably around March or April. I'm tempted to keep it bulk aging until next September so the dry hop will be more present when I'm drinking it next winter, but I'm not sure if I have the self-discipline to keep it out of bottles that long because that would mean I couldn't sample it in the meantime.

This went into a five gallon carboy with roughly a gallon of headspace sometime in early December, losing close to a gallon to trub because I typically dump everything into the fermenter. I added a couple tablespoons of boiled sugar to get a little extra ferment to get some CO2 in the headspace, but being a barleywine where some oxidation can be desirable, I wasn't too worried about it.

I finally tossed in the dry hops on April 24th. I ended up going roughly 50/50 with Calypso and Caliente instead of just Calypso and the dry hop was just under 3 ounces split between the two. I planned to bag them but couldn't get them through the carboy neck so they went straight in.

Yesterday was bottling day. The dry hops (pellet) were almost all floating on top of the beer (no mold or other growths) but a little swirl precipitated most of them to the bottom. Should have given it a couple days of cold crashing. I filtered them out through some cheesecloth when I racked onto 80 grams of boiled unrefined cane sugar in the bottling bucket. Bottling went smoothly (better than I can say for both my previous bottling day and the IPA I bottled after the barleywine) and I got 44 330mL bottles out of the batch for just under 15 liters. Could have gotten one more bottle but I poured it into a nonic pint instead because there was a lot of particulate that had found its way through the cheesecloth filter.

The only concern is that I had intended to add champagne yeast with the bottling sugar but I forgot to do so. On one hand, it's a 12.4% US-05 brew that's been in secondary with minimal yeast for almost six months. On the other hand, my last couple ~10% RIS's were bottled in the same conditions without any extra yeast added at bottling and they carbed up just fine. Time will tell if I screwed the pooch and need to add conditioning yeast to the bottles or if they'll carb up on their own.

I drank about half of the dregs leftover from bottling last night, uncarbed but chilled in the fridge. Boozy, definite sherry notes and good body. I have no idea how it compares to what I would have gotten if I had gone with a bunch of specialty malts for character instead of the long boil, but it's a good beer so there's that. I'll have to investigate further tonight after work.

Tried the sample again last night paying a bit more attention to the flavors and aromas. Lots of toffee to go along with the raisins and stone fruits and booze. The aroma was strongly muted after a day in an open glass in the fridge.

Entry the nth in the brew diary that time forgot:

I refrigerated one bottle and cracked it a few days ago (June 9th, I think). Carbonation was lovely so it looks like failing to add champagne yeast at bottling was not an issue in the end. The beer still showed a few rough edges from being relatively young for a big barleywine, but it was big, complex, and delicious. I'm afraid I didn't take any notes, but I remember slightly-sour dried dark cherries standing out as one of the flavors in the mix, which sounds pretentious but that's the impression I got when I tried to single out flavors.

Thanks Dragon for a good read! It looks like a good beer you made!

Drank one of these last night. Since my beer/storage room's running around 10C these days, I've been drinking more beers straight off the shelf rather than out of the fridge lately, so I drank this at a cool room temperature that opened up a lot of flavors you don't get in a beer served cold.

Opening the bottle released a big, boozy, oxidized aroma. The taste has definitely migrated more in the oxidized dessert wine direction while still carrying a healthy malt backbone but not as much toffee flavor as before; it's possible that drinking it colder would mute the oxidized flavors a bit more and swing the flavor back towards the malt like before. In spite of a very boozy aroma, the booze doesn't come out much in the flavor of the beer. Overall it's still quite good, but it has some distinctive characteristics that wouldn't please everybody.

If I were to make this beer again, I would probably work a bit harder to minimize oxidization - probably with a shorter bulk aging period and greater effort to minimize headspace/oxygen in secondary. I think some oxidized flavors work very well with it, but a little over 13 months after brewday it's probably already passed the peak balance of malt versus oxidization and as it continues to mature it will keep driving deeper into "not for everybody" territory.

I had already started to assimilate some of this learning into this year's long-term beer - a quad - by making a larger batch that will fill more of the carboy for secondary/bulk aging and saving a hundred grams or so of candi syrup to rack onto in order to produce a bit of CO2 and clear the headspace of the carboy, but I'll probably also bottle the quad earlier and let it bottle age rather than allowing several months of bulk aging like I did with the barleywine. Both styles appreciate a bit of oxidization, but a year or two in bottles is going to do that job without needing too much help from a long secondary.

I ended up not drinking much of this during the winter (even though it was brewed to be a winter warmer) because I was a bit disappointed by the oxidized flavors and didn't really want to be reminded of them every time I cracked a bottle. I shared a couple at the local brewpub and felt like it had the same issue, even though everybody else raved about it. I even freeze concentrated five bottles of it for fun (haven't yet tried more than a drop of the harvest) and to get rid of some of it, but I still have about twenty bottles left.

Last night I decided to crack one that had been in the fridge for a few months. It was stellar - the oxidization flavors weren't as apparent (maybe bottle by bottle, or maybe I was mis-diagnosing the flavor and it was something else that has mellowed) and it was just a big, delicious barleywine. Half an hour after I finished it my wife thought she smelled dried longan on my breath, and later that night she asked if I'd been eating lychees. Anyway, just another brew log update on this beer that keeps on giving almost a year and a half after brewday.