News & Reference

Planning Ahead For A Weekend Brewing Session

Homebrewing

The All Grain Brewer   |   Thursday, February 02 2012

American Barleywine :  Thinking through the required ingredients, equipment, process, and timing.

Tweet

 

So this weekend I am going to brew an American Barley Wine. So let’s go through a mental brewing session to make sure we are ready. To begin, do I have all the ingredients? I have been known to start brewing only to realize later I was missing an ingredient, generally it's hops since it comes later in the game.

First, I need lots of base malt. So one of my home brew buddies GAVE me a half used bag of Marris Otter because it was over a year old, so I want to use it as fast as possible. I don’t think that it is unusable like he did, but it does not need anymore age on it. Barley wine ale is a great way to use up copious amounts of grain. If you’re a brewing purest your saying – an American beer can’t use a British base malt. “You must use American two-row malt.” The answer is “no I don’t”. I can do whatever I want. I use Marris Otter for most of my ales. It’s just that good. I see the recipe also calls for some Crystal 40 and a little Special B. I have both of those in my possession, so I’m cool on grain. I have tons of home grown Chinook and Cascade, so I am good there. I’m going to want some table sugar as well, and I know the wife has some of that.

One word here, while I have no problem using a British malt, I would never use anything but American hops. Drinkers of my beer will not be able to perceive my Marris Otter base malt versus an American two-row, but there is a big difference between earthy British hops and citrusy American hops.

I need to make sure my cordless drill is charged because I’m going to use it attached to my grain mill to help grind all the grain that it takes to make a barley wine, which for me is going to be about 21 pounds for a 5 gallon batch.

So I have all my ingredients – check. I now need about six gallons of water in my hot liquor kettle, which is a turkey frying kettle that I never used to fry a turkey in. I will use this water to mash my grains in my 10 gallon Igloo cooler with a false bottom. I will use a strike temperature of my mash water at about 170 F with the hope of a final mash temperature of about 149 F once the mash water and grains are blended (mashed) together. Of course for this exercise I will need my handy digital thermometer. I always have a spare thermometer because I have dropped my thermometer in the kettle before with lousy consequences. Sometimes you have to be your own little home brew store when mishaps plague you during brewing.

Let’s see, I mash the grains for 90 minutes, and with about 40 minutes left in the mash I start heating up my sparge water. My sparge water should get to 170 F right when the 90 minutes is finished for the mash. I then move the mash cooler to a platform that gets my mash tun above my brew kettle and then I gravity sparge into the brew kettle.

So now my Igloo cooler mash tun now magically turns into a sparge tun. To make sure I have a proper grain bed in my now sparge tun I drain out about a gallon of wort and then pour it back on top of the grain bed in the sparge tun. I do have a food grade bowl, with a million holes drilled in it, on top of the grain in the sparge tun so pouring water on the grain bed through the bowl does not affect the grain bed. I then sparge SLOWLY until I fill the brew kettle to the desired liquid level. When I say slowly, I like to take 20 to 30 minutes to sparge (rinse) my grains. Sparging is all about getting the sugars off the grain and into the brew kettle, and that liquid is then called wort.

Now I boil the wort for 90 minutes, add my hops when appropriate, and my Irish moss. When there is 15 minutes left I put my wort chiller (copper coil heat exchanger) in the boil to make sure it gets sanitized. At the end of the boil it’s a race to get the wort chilled as quickly as possible, and to get the yeast pitched into the wort to start fermentation. Speed is of the essence because wort in a cool state is infection friendly, so you need yeast making alcohol and CO2 because both kill harmful microorganisms that create off-flavors in your beer.

The All Grain Brewer Has Spoken