Scum (in the) bucket

[bmantzey]

I'm making a barley wine that's simply 21lbs of Maris Otter and a little bit of 55L Crystal.

I made a mistake when I used my new mash paddle (that I made from scratch).

I decided to stir the mash right before it was ready to be sparged. This caused a whole bunch of crud to get through and into my brew. I mean, a lot.

The thing I'm wondering is, would it be okay to use a sieve to try to fish out some of that scum or is that stuff actually consumed by the yeast during fermentation? Maybe I should just wait until my boil is done and use the sieve during my aeration phase... any thoughts?

 

[Tinga]

any sieve that is fine enough to catch that scum will severely slow down your process. the scum is probably long strands of cellulose so the yeast wont eat it but with the long aging required in doing barley wines all the scum will settle out on its own. pretty quickly I'm guessing

 

[bmantzey]

Hmm, the recipe doesn't call for any particularly different aging. Any good references you could point me to so I can learn? (btw, the ale only uses one phase of yeast - no wine yeast).

 

[RM-MN]

From what I've been reading, dark beers and high alcohol beers take extended aging. My porter and stouts take 2 months to get really good and I suspect your barleywine will take at least that long. All the crud you got in there will have settled and compacted into the yeast cake long before your barleywine is ready to drink. BTW. don't be in a rush to get this off the yeast cake either. Leaving it in the primary seems to be part of cleaning up the yeast's byproducts. I'd give it at least a month in the primary.