WLP099 Question

[jvincent825]

Hi,

Back in the beginning of February I made a big English Barley Wine. The BW recipe is one I've used before and won several awards with. OG is 1.105. I used WLP007, Dry English Ale, for primary fermentation. After about a month it pooped out at 1.038, usually gets down to about 1.023, so I decided to use WLP099, Super High Gravity, to dry it out a bit more. I had never used this strain before. I made a 1.5 L starter (1.055) and pitched the whole thing at high krausen, wanted the yeast to be super active when they hit the BW. It went down to about 1.015 before it looked like it was finally petering out, over about 3 weeks. So I threw it in a newly acquired Balcones Bourbon barrel. The barely was still nicely swollen and smelled amazing, there was no residual liquid in the barrel. I've had one of those breathable bungs in it ever since. It occasionally gave of a hiss for a while, but I just left it alone. I checked the beer this morning, and the apparent gravity was 0.950, making the guestimated ABV 20%, not accounting for anything from the WLP099 starter. It smells great, really great. The flavor has some alcohol hotness to it, but the beer will be awesome for blending. I'm in no hurry with this guy. I'll probably move it to a 5 gallon carboy to bulk age sometime soon and use it to blend with non-barrel aged batches of the BW. My question is, is this normal behavior for WLP099? Or was there something else at play? There are no off flavors other than the high alcohol. Thanks!!

 

[jalmeida]

Strange. That is either a ton of attenuation or alcohol that was soaked in the wood. I have been reading about brett C in wood casks that can sometimes continue fermenting the leftover sugars even farther than regular yeast does. But I bet their was residual alcohol in the wood.


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[Hopper5000]

How old was the balcones barrel? Freshly dumped I would assume? That is fairly unusual to have a beer go below 1. It could be from the 99 but that would be unusual. I think the calculators get a little screwy when you go below 1.000 on the FG btw. If you type in 1.105 and 1.001 then you get about 14%, so your brew is probably in the 14-15% range. Did you get any earthy or cherry notes (that would potentially be brett although at that alcohol range it's getting hard for most things to survive.)? I threw a RIS with 99 in one of those barrels and it got down to 1.000. I was very surprised at this and I made another beer, blended it, and left it for 6 months to see if it soured. Nothing happened so it's probably fine.

 

[Osedax]

First off... Balcone's! Love their whiskey. I always have to have a bottle of baby blue hanging around.

On an actual related note, I too just did a barleywine and am aging it in a Tuthilltown bourbon barrel. It finished slightly higher than I wanted it to. It stopped at 1.024. I want it around 1.018. It's more of an imperial brown ale than a barleywine. I was going to pitch a healthy dose of 99. Now you have me worried.

Does it seem to dry or off? Just curious before I start messing with it.

Also @Hopper5000, are you using a high gravity formula?

 

[Hopper5000]

IMHO it's better to have a higher OG when you are going to barrel age a beer because the hard alcohol tends to dry things out. No I didn't use a high gravity calculator but technically he dropped 115 gravity points and 8 gravity points is roughly 1 percent so that math puts it at about 14-15%. It is very difficult to get beer above about 14-15% without topping off constantly with sugar or wort. Look up how to do a 120min IPA clone. Even using a more accurate calculator like brewersfriend.com's alternate ABV, still skews it high.