Barleywine questions

[MetalMan2004]

Did the same thing shortly before my son was conceived. Barleywine - 60IBU - 11.5% ABV. It's been cellaring on its side in a wine-rack since 2005. Even addressed it to the "little one" since he wasn't even conceived yet. Might suck, might not, but I'm looking forward to the trying it with my son on his 21st birthday. If you don't do it now - you can't. . .

Good luck and enjoy the process. . .
P

You are very right Plove! I must admit, I do plan on tasting before he's 21 (a little selfish I know). A 5 gallon batch yields about 50 beers, so I plan to drink maybe 1 each year on his birthday and keep a tasting journal of it. That leaves 30 beers for his 21st birthday.

 

[DSorenson]

^^^ I second this notion. 21 years of fatherhood will warrant a beer every year. Consider it payment for all the stuff your son will do that will cause you a headache!

 

[BadWolfBrewing]

I say drink one for every dirty diaper. The batch should last you a week.

Sent from somebody with no kids...

 

[MetalMan2004]

Okay, so I'm crunching numbers and I must be missing something here. I tried to calculate a grain bill using the formulas in "Designing Great Beers." I will explain what I did and you can tell me what I am doing wrong (this should be pretty simple so I don't get what I'm missing.

Step 1:
5.5 gallon final product
1.030 final gravity
Gravity units= 5.5x30=165

Step 2:
90% pale 2 row
10% crystal
GU for pale=165x.9=148.5
GU for crystal=165x.1=16.5

Step 3:
GU per lb of pale= 35
GU per lb of crystal= 33
Efficiancy 70%
lbs of pale = 148.5/35/.7=6.1 lbs
Lbs of crystal= 16.5/33/.7=.7 lbs
Total lbs of grain= 6.8

Predone recipes for barlewines show 20+ lbs of grain for 5 gallons. What am I missing?

 

[DSorenson]

Ah, you used the final gravity to calculate the total amount of gus. You are looking to predict your post boil gravity.

So mine was 6 gallons post boil of 100 gus. That's 600 total. The rest of your calculations were executed correctly.

Also, 70 efficiency is perhaps a little high of an estimation considering the amount of grain you will be mashing. Who knows though, that's your system.if you've gotten 70 percent before with over 18 lbs of grain I would say you have a chance.

Also think about water to grain ratio: if you are doing all grain in a 10 gallon mash tun, you might not even have enough room to get 1 quart per lb grain in.

 

[MetalMan2004]

See I was thinking logically that I should use gravity at the end of the boil as you state, but in both of the examples he does in the book he specifically uses final gravity (I went back and checked like 3 times because it didn't make sense to me. Must be a misprint...).

Regarding your notes on the size of the operation, how do you think it would be affected if I split everything into 2 equal smaller mashes/ boils and then add everything together once it all is boiled down enough to fit into 1 pot?

 

[MetalMan2004]

Using OG of 1.095 I get 19 lbs of pale malt and 2.25 lbs crystal malt. That makes much better since. That is a pretty important misprint in the book....

 

[DSorenson]

Yeah, I agree. He might have actually said final gravity referring to the final gravity of the boil... but I don't know. It's been a while since I've read that part. I think either it's a miss print or he seriously needs to reconsider his word choices, considering how specific they can be for homebrewers.

Also, for my barley wine I used 5 percent caramel/crystal, because in a beer half it's gravity the same amount represents 10% of the fermentables. I believe it can be easy to use too much. For instance:

Say you were making an imperial stout by merely doubling a recipe you have. Say the original recipe calls for 1 lb of roasted barley. That means your imperial stout, for the same volume of beer, will contain 2 lbs of roasted barley. To me that seems like too much, even though technically speaking it's the same percentage of fermentables. I don't feel like flavors in beer increase linearly with the addition of malts.

Just food for thought!

Regarding your notes on the size of the operation, how do you think it would be affected if I split everything into 2 equal smaller mashes/ boils and then add everything together once it all is boiled down enough to fit into 1 pot?

If you have the ability to make two separate batches of beer and combine them after the fact, that's not a bad idea. You would need to run the equivalent amount of water through each mash tun as if you were making a full volume beer... IF you are trying to reach your standard efficiency. This means a longer boil time to get rid of that water.

And here we go: the ol' hot-side aeration bit. I don't intend to start a HSA debate here, but I have strong personal evidence of it, so I take precautions to avoid it.

If you're not familiar with it, it's the idea that oxidation of beer happens faster at high temperatures. This scenario usually occurs during the transferring of hot wort.

I'm not sure how you can combine two volumes of boiling water into the same pot without turbulent mixture. I suppose a silicon hose for a siphon (careful not to scald yourself getting it started) or if you already have a valve on your pots, you could use the silicon tubing with that.

You begin to see why I chose to do partial mash...

 

[MetalMan2004]

Also, for my barley wine I used 5 percent caramel/crystal, because in a beer half it's gravity the same amount represents 10% of the fermentables.

I will probably be leaning more towards 5-6% crystal as well. I just picked 2 quick numbers to play around with the formulas since I have never used them before. It seems most of the recipes like this I see out there are 5-6%.

And here we go: the ol' hot-side aeration bit. I don't intend to start a HSA debate here, but I have strong personal evidence of it, so I take precautions to avoid it.

Maybe instead of combining while hot and continuing to boil, I could do 2 2.5 gallon recipes at the exact same time and take them both all the way to cold crash seperately, then combine in the carboy. I assume this would avoid the HSA problem?

 

[DSorenson]

That would certainly avoid the HSA issue! You're dedicated to the cause: I like that.

Consider what it means to do two 2.5 gallons recipes.

If you are using half the grain per... say... 3.5 preboil volume, you are still using about 11 lbs per batch. What you have done is increased the effective volume in your mash tun so you can have more water in it. and slightly increased your sparging volume. This is a big help.

However, in order to completely treat these batches as you would two normal batches of beer, you would be mashing and sparging both as if you were going to have ~6 pre-boil gallons. The only reason why you would want to do this, of course, is to make sure you hit your typical efficiencies. You would be boiling the wort for about 6 hours before you got rid of all the excess water.

Of course if you are willing to take a hit on efficiency, that's cool too. You just have to do one of two things:
1) incorporate an estimate of your poorer efficiency into your grain calculations, or
2) keep that DME on hand for gravity correction.

In the name of brotherly love, I strongly encourage the partial mash idea once more. However you have my support for an all grain as well!

Just to clarify things a bit: by "cold crash" you meant "chill". Cold crashing refers to dropping the temperature of the post fermentation product to help clear up the beer.

I love your grain bill. It's simple and to the style. I find it personally challenging to avoid tinkering with tried and true, but man does tried and true turn out results!

I'm merely playing devils advocate to make sure you've considered everything!

 

[MetalMan2004]

Okay so I used Recipator to run some numbers and I came up with the following:

finished volume: 2.75 (times 2)
FG 1.030

Sparge: 2.5 gallons
boil volume: 5.25 gallons

Grain bill:
11 lbs British Pale
.5 lbs Crystal

1.5 oz east kent golding at 45 mins

The end result with 70% efficiency should be:

OG1.111
ABV: 10.4%
47 IBU

So what do you think? Incredibly simple recipe, keeping it true to the style. So how long do you think it would take to boil off 2.5 gallons? I got all day, and it sounds like it might take all day.

 

[DSorenson]

Hey, sorry my man... life is pretty busy right now, but I've been meaning to check up on this thread.

2.5 gallons takes me about 2 and a half hours with my blichmann floor burner. Not sure about your system, though. about a gallon an hour is about normal, from what I've experienced.

As I understand it, you have two batches at 5.25 gallons preboil.
My math says that is a total volume of 10.5 gallons combined. If you boil off 2.5 gallons you still have 8 gallons remaining.

I suppose I just don't understand the numbers right now. I'm heading into engineering finals week, so I'm pretty blasted or I'd take the time to crunch some out myself.

On second thought, I'll see what I can come up with. I'll pretend I have your efficiency and everything.

Shooting for about a lb of caramel? good work. Also, the british pale is exactly what I used. Something called crisp, I believe.
Good work limiting the hops to a reasonable amount. a lb of hops really killed me.

I'll get back to ya about what I figure out.

 

[DSorenson]

Okay, I ran some fast numbers. I used 100 GUs for your final gravity. The following recipe is for one half of the brew. You brew this beer twice to get the volume you want.

0.53 lbs Crystal/Caramel

9.43 lbs 2 row

3.75 gallons mash water
2.25 gallons sparge water

Boil for 2 hours

Post boil volume: 2.5 gallons

Of course you're going to have losses, so perhaps I should calculate a half gallon more than that per batch.
That kinda gives you a ball park, I hope

 

[MetalMan2004]

Yes I have my post boil volume set at 2.75 so that when I combine the 2 I will have 5.5 gallons.

Good luck on finals! You seem quite advanced in home brewing for a college kid. Only thing I ever made in college was wine using Welch's grape juice. It didn't taste the best but it worked!

 

[ajwillys]

When considering your recipe and how to get the efficiency you desire, consider a longer than normal boil. On my barleywine's, I just plan on sparging until my runnings are around 1.015. The shortest boil I've ever done in a BW was 2.5 hours. The longest was just shy of 4. I'm a big fan of epic boils for BW's. I know it helps with efficiency and I think it helps to caramelize the flavors a bit. I also always add a pound of plain old sugar just to help dry it out a bit. I shoot for about a mid 20's FG (1.022-1.028).

If you do a long boil, keep track of your boil off rate so you can determine on the fly when to start your "60 minute countdown". That way you can still keep on track with your hops.

 

[MetalMan2004]

Good til on the timing ajwillys . To tell you the truth I have never done such an exact recipe. I always just do the best I can and it always turns out decent (nit always great, but decent). There is a lot more to pay attention to this go round.

 

[TAK]

Just my $0.02, but if I where in your shoes, I'd do the two seperate mashes since you can't fit it all in you MT, but combine the runnings from both before the boil. I don't think there'd be any harm done to the runnings from mash 1 waiting for the runnings from mash 2 before boiling.

Or, you could even start boiling the runnings from mash 1 while your mashing your 2nd time. That'd get your boil off started. Then just stop the boil and collect the runnings from mash 2 in your kettle, and resume boiling again.

 

[DSorenson]

Haha, thanks Metalman2004. I'm actually 28 and going back to school for another degree after the first one didn't work out. I do love this hobby though. The other most recent posters have some cool advice. The epic boil does sound fun and a great way to burn propane up.

Question to ajwillys: is over sparging a thing? and should anyone be concerned about it?

 

[ajwillys]

Question to ajwillys: is over sparging a thing? and should anyone be concerned about it?

Yes, it definitely is a thing. The rule I go by is that I sparge until the runnings coming out are at 1.015 gravity. Often times with BW, I get way more wort than I want before I get to this level.

I also agree with the poster about two mashes. I've done it and it works fine. Just go ahead and start lightly boiling the first while you do the second. Wait to start your 60 minute timer until you've boiled off a pre-determined amount (based on boil off rate). If you have a buddy with an MLT that works too.

 

[DSorenson]

Just had a sample of my barleywine at 4 weeks and I have to say I am already in love with it. I am very glad I didn't use more than a pound of caramel. It's there in just the right quantity. I am excited! The yeast is attenuated at 1.024 and the residual sugars are a nice touch

 

[BadWolfBrewing]

Congrats, a barley wine is quite the accomplishment

 

[MetalMan2004]

Yes, congrats on the barley wine! Also, hope the finals went well! That is something I definitely don't miss.

So it seems like the consensus is that 2 equal 2.75 gallon batches will be fine. The devil is in the details though which brings me to another question. I currently have only 1 6 gallon pot and multiple smaller pots. That means only 1 batch can boil at a time unless I buy another pot. So what do you guys think would happen if I did one batch to completion, put it in the fermenter and then did the second batch? Obviously each batch takes a long time (don't worry I have plenty of that) so the first batch would be sitting in the fermenter for several hours before the 2nd batch is added.

The alternative is a just buy a 2nd large pot.

 

[DSorenson]

I don't see a problem with that. I just think it will be more work. If you can, get a bigger pot, you won't be sorry. Otherwise you can do it as two separate ferments and combine later.

Also, technically my BW isn't finished yet. It's still in primary. It's just really good already.

also, finals didn't go as well as I wanted, but I still got a 4.0!

 

[MetalMan2004]

Well if your GPA is perfect, I don't see how they could have gone any better!

I am enjoying an Old Ruffian barley wine tonight by Great Divide and my mind is blown by the complex fruit flavors. I looked up a clone recipe and it had a 1/2 lb of victory malt, 1/2 lb of caramel malt and 1/2 lb of wheat. It has me thinking about small tweeks I could make hat could potentially add lots of flavor. The problem with 21 years of aging is I think all those flavors that are there now won't be later, while that classic caramel flavor can shine through even 2 decades later.

So, I'm now looking for that one special addition to make this unique.

 

[DSorenson]

Victory/Biscuit malts might not be a bad addition. They add a slightly toasty flavor to beer and in quantity can create the perception of dryness. Honestly I feel like wheat adds the perception of sweetness and (objectively) body to the beer. That might not be exactly what you are looking for here, but I suppose it couldn't hurt. Rye is a great alternative, as in my experience it tends to have a drying effect while increasing the body of the beer. Used in quantity (20-30%) it reminds me of apple brandy.

Vienna tends to add a little toasty/grainy/warm effect. I'm not sure if using a portion of Vienna might not be a bad idea. As the flavor contributions from vienna are never as intense, you could probably get away with using a few pounds of the stuff.

Any way you go, using half pound additions for the specialty grains is probably smart! With bigger beers I notice it is easy to over do these things.

 

[DSorenson]

Hey man, I hope you haven't given up on your barleywine! I bottled mine yesterday with the oxy-seal caps and used 'wine gas' (CO2, N2, Ar) to purge the head spaces of the bottles. Today I'm waxing the tops.

If you are curious, the wine gas was about ten bucks for a steel can. I probably wouldn't have done this except that these bottles might last a long time. It's called "Private Reserve Wine Preserver" and comes in a maroon and gold aerosol can.

 

[MetalMan2004]

For 10 bucks that's probably money we'll spent. I certainly haven't given up, just been busy and then went on a mini vacation but I'm back! No time to brew anything this weekend or next, but maybe the weekend of July 4th. This weekend was devoted to our anniversary and a nice long broker smoke.

 

[DSorenson]

The weekend of July 4th is practically here!

 

[MetalMan2004]

Brew day is here again! It's been a while since I checked in on this, been busy getting baby stuff set up.

We did do a brew on July 4 that was a cream ale and it should be ready on Friday.

On to the barley wine! I am going with the idea of 2 separate all grain batches combined in the Carboy. I am doing 1 batch of 11 lb Maris otter with 1 lb 75 German crystal and another of 11 lb 2 row with 1 lb German 75 crystal. I have 1.5 oz of hops for each batch to come in just above 30 IBUs.

Wish me luck! It's going to be a LONG brew day.

 

[MetalMan2004]

So it took me from about 9am to midnight, but I did it! The Carboy is bubbling away in a cooler of 65 degree water.

It was quite he epic experience. Both batches had a boil time of about 3 hrs each to get down to the target gravity of about 1.115. I ended up with a total if about 4.5 gallons which is a little less than I planned for, but not by too much. I would rather hit the proper gravity than hit the volume.

This was the first time to use my new spigots that I installed in my brew kettle and ale pail and it certainly made sparging easier. It was a long day with a lot learned!