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An American Barelywine; a true patriot

Homebrewing

The All Grain Brewer   |   Thursday, February 09 2012

BJCP Category 19C :  Contrinuing the discussion all the way through to fermentation.

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So last week in I talked about brewing an American Barleywine. I followed through on my weekend goal, and got it done. Therefore I will now discuss my hopes for the newly brewed beer. If you did not read last week's post, stop now, and proceed to read last week's post. If you did read last week's post then holy crap someone does read this stuff. Enjoy this Issue – An American Barelywine; a true patriot.

I like to start-off with the recipe so we have some direction for our discussion. As always a 5 gallon recipe, with a 90 minute mash, and a 90 minute boil:

• 19 lbs Marris Otter
• 0.5 lbs Crystal 70 L
• 0.5 lbs Crystal 40 L
• 0.25 lbs Special “B”
• 2 lbs of cane sugar
• Mash at 149F – note it takes 6 gallons of hot liquor (water) to mash-in 20 lbs of grain.

• 2.0 ounces of Chinook, 60 minutes
• 3.3 ounces of Cascade, 60 minutes

• 3.4 ounces of Cascade, flame-out
• 1.75 ounces of Chinook, flame-out

All hops were home grown, thus whole leaf.

Upon cool down the 68 F wort was poured into my 6.5 gallon glass carboy using a strainer and funnel arrangement directly on my American IPA yeast cake (reference my post about The Style of an American IPA). Earlier in the day, I transferred the American IPA from the carboy directly into a keg. This now allowed me to have a fresh yeast cake of White Labs 001 – California Ale yeast at my full disposal. I had fermentation activity after about three hours from pouring the barleywine wort on top of the yeast cake.

Due to the fact that I used so much leaf hops I started the boil at 7 gallons, which is about a half gallon more than I usually do, as I usually evaporate about 1.5 gallons during my 90 minute boil. I did this because I noticed with my American IPA that the large volume of leaf hops soaked up a large amount of my wort, therefore I want to end my boil at about 5.5 gallons instead of 5.0 gallons.

There were so many hops in my kettle that I knew I was going to have to manage them somehow. Therefore, I did something that I have never tried before. Since I was adding all the aroma hops at flame out, I started using my strainer with about 5 minutes left to scoop out the bittering hops. I would take a full scoop, and then let that drain about a minute back into the boiling wort. I would then discard the used bittering hops. This seemed to work pretty good.

Next, after I got the wort cooled down to a yeast pitching temperature I sanitized my strainer, and scooped out as much leaf hops as I could basically using the same technique. I worried a little about final product contamination, but I knew I had the strength of the yeast cake to start making alcohol and CO2 quickly which would help kill any unwanted infections. In this beer I guess they are all unwanted.

The barleywine is currently fermenting away. I’ll have to let you know how it turned out in a future article.

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