I have never tried to hide my love of barleywine, particularly the glory that is JW Lee’s Harvest Ale. Back in April, I made my first attempt at making a barleywine of my own. That batch was a one gallon all-grain batch, which fell short of my expectations in a number of ways. The main issue was that I had yet to sort out a reasonably effect mash technique, so the gravity wound up much, much lower than intended, even with some dextrose and brown sugar dumped in the boil as an emergency measure. It turned out reasonably well with some age, though I think it’s a bit dry and thin bodied.
The recipe for this batch was the same as the last one: Marris Otter malt, East Kent Goldings hops, and Wyeast London Ale III yeast repitched from the KK. This batch was supposed to be 2.25 gallons, and the plan is to split this in two one-gallon glass jugs for secondary. Half the batch will be conditioned normally, while the other half will sit on oak cubes that are currently soaking in Lagavulin whisky. Should be interesting.
Started out with 11 pounds of grain, mashed it for an hour, and collected about 4.2 gallons of wort. The pre-boil gravity was 1.065. According to one of the post-boild gravity calculators I checked, that would make for a post-boil gravity of 1.120, which was my target. The plan was to boil everything for an hour before adding the hops and boiling for a second hour.
Things went fairly smoothly, except the wort didn’t boil off as fast as expected and I likely still have a fair bit to learn about accounting for hop loss in recipe formulation. In the end, I wound up with about 2.4 gallons of 1.094 gravity wort. Next time, I’ll boil it down further before starting the hop additions.
Repitched slurry from the KK that I racked on Friday and had active fermentation within 8 hours or so.
Mmmm. “Slurry.”
Next time, we should just cross-ventilate the beer with the box fan — maybe it’ll concentrate more quickly that way, and any extra cat hair that gets into the boil will be strained out at the end.