Barleywine (VII: Fermentation I)

December 26, 2013 by Leave a Comment

This article is part of a series on barleywine.

 

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Conducting an orderly fermentation is key to brewing a quality barleywine. The biggest key to doing this at home is to make an adequately-sized yeast starter and pitch enough yeast.

Making the wort for a barleywine can be trying. Sometimes the amount of grain required is more than your mash tun can hold. Sometimes you can’t collect all the wort you’d like because your kettle is too small. And for most all-grain versions, you need to boil the wort for an extended period of time. Even though wort production can be a chore, the part of brewing a barleywine in which the brewer can exercise the most influence on the quality of the final product is the next step — fermentation. If you make a yeast starter that is large enough, your fermentation can be handled like most ale fermentations, especially for smaller barleywines. For the largest barleywines, you may need to use some additional techniques to get all you want from the yeast,

 

Your Goals

Once the wort is chilled and in the fermenter, it’s time to let the yeast transform the wort into beer. In a barleywine fermentation, you have several goals. As with any fermentation, you want active fermentation to begin quickly. If your barleywine has a cap of kräusen and your airlock is gurgling between 8 and 16 hours after pitching the yeast, you’re doing great. If it takes longer than 24 hours to start, you may be headed for problems. (At a minimum, this could lead to a sluggish fermentation that takes longer than it should to finish). Likewise, once started, you want the fermentation to keep moving steadily until the beer’s target final gravity (FG) is reached. Most barleywines should finish in the high teens through the 20s. (The BJCP gives FG 1.018–1.030 for English barleywines and FG 1.016–1.030 for American barleywines as the proper range.) For beers at the lower end of the barleywine OG range (OG 1.080–1.090), this means you want a maximum apparent attenuation of around 75%. For heavier barleywines, apparent attenuation up to 80% is OK. The biggest key to achieving this is to pitch an adequate amount of yeast. Choosing an appropriate yeast strain is also important.

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Barleywine (VI: Boiling and Hops)

December 24, 2013 by Leave a Comment

This article is part of a series on barleywine.

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Brewing a barleywine sometimes involves an extended boil.

Once you’ve collected your wort, it’s time to boil. In most cases, brewing an all-grain barleywine involves an extended boil. When making an extract barleywine, or an all-grain barleywine from first wort, an extended boil may not be needed. Barleywines are amply hopped, so the amount of hop debris that will be generated should be considered when choosing a hopping schedule.

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Barleywine (V:All-Grain Wort Production)

December 23, 2013 by 2 Comments
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There are several options for making a barleywine

Once an all-grain brewer has decided on the malts to use in his or her barleywine, the next thing to consider is the method of wort production. (I covered extract wort production earlier.) Depending on the method you use, you may have to alter your recipe from an initial recipe based on your normal extract efficiency.

 

Goals

Your goal in wort production is produce a wort at the correct OG and volume, and with a fermentability that can range from middle-of-the-road to fairly high. Hitting your target OG will be easier if you review the elements that contribute to extract efficiency. Crushing the malt finely enough, stirring and performing a mash out all help in this respect. And of course, your method of wort production is also going to influence your extract efficiency based on how much wort you collect from the grain bed.

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Barleywine (IV: Attenuation and Malts)

December 17, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Belgian goblet

Barleywines are big, full-bodied beers. (This beer was a pale ale, but the color looks about right for a barleywine.)

Barleywines are full-bodied beers. Unlike double IPAs, which are also big, hoppy ales, the final gravity of a barleywine is usually in the 20s, when going by “gravity points” (SG 1.020–1.029). Sometimes it creeps up into the low 30s and others it drops into the high 10s. (The BJCP gives FG 1.018–1.030 for English barleywines and 1.016–1.030 for 1.016–1.030 for American barleywines.) For double IPAs, the brewer must make an effort to get the beer to finish under 1.020, or the hop character may be obscured.

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Barleywine (III: Color)

December 16, 2013 by 2 Comments

BWJcolorRecipes for barleywines can be very simple. Before exploring how to formulate a barleywine recipe, however, it pays to look at two things — color and attenuation. In this article, we’ll examine color.

 

Color

Barleywines are, of course, strong ales. Their color varies from amber to copper, with a few English examples being in the brown range. The color of barleywine wort comes from three possible sources, caramelization during the boil, Maillard reactions during the boil and the concentration of colored molecules derived from the malt. (These molecules would be formed by Maillard reactions or caramelization during the malting process.)

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Barleywine (II: Extract Wort Production-II)

December 12, 2013 by Leave a Comment

This is the second of two articles on extract wort production in the series of articles on barleywine. The previous article was published yesterday.

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An old can of malt extract.

Making a barleywine wort using malt extract as the primary source of fermentables is straightforward — for the most part, you just dissolve the malt extract in water. However — as I discussed in the previous article on influencing the amount of trub and altering the fermentability of the wort — there are ways to tweak your wort production to make brewday easier and your beer better.

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Barleywine (II: Extract Wort Production-I)

December 10, 2013 by 2 Comments

This is the first of two articles on extract wort production in the series of articles on barleywine.

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Fresh malt extract can be the base of a great barleywine.

When making a barleywine wort from malt extract, there are several things the brewer should consider. All the usual advice still applies — use fresh malt extract, boil as much volume as you can (and still maintain a vigorous boil) and add some of the malt extract late in the boil (if you are boiling less than the full wort).

In addition, some aspects of wort production are only going to apply to barleywine or other big, hoppy beers. One thing that always improves an extract beer is supplementing the extract wort with wort a partial mash. Adding some base malt to your extract recipe adds back some of the malt aroma that was lost when the malt extract was concentrated or dried. This is true for a barleywine as well, but I would recommend making a small partial mash — around 2.0–4.0 lbs. (0.91–1.8 kg) — rather than a larger one. For one thing, although some malt aroma is lost in the manufacture of malt extract, some of it is retained. In a barleywine wort, the large amount of malt extract required means that some malt aroma will be present. More importantly, in an extract barleywine, reducing the amount of trub and hop debris should be a priority. This is especially true when the brewer is boiling less than a full wort.

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Barleywine (I:Introduction and Overview)

December 9, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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Do you like crushing malt? That’s good.

Among pale or amber British ales, there is a “ladder” of sorts with regards to strength. Starting at the bottom with ordinary bitters and proceeding through best bitters, ESBs, IPAs, old ales (the amber versions, at least), the list leads all the way up to barleywines. All these beers share similar recipes — the core of which is a pale malt base, with a dose of crystal malt, and ample hopping. Among American ales, a similar ladder exists among the light-colored, hoppy ales — American pale ale gives way to American IPA. And, although there are American  barleywines, there’s another beer in the mix — double IPAs (or imperial IPAs). Although both barleywines and imperial IPAs are big, hoppy beers, they do have differences that separate them. These differences can help us to better define barleywine.

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Golden Ale (III: Boiling and Beyond)

November 29, 2013 by Leave a Comment

I hope all our readers had a wonderful Thanksgiving and have plenty of leftovers for the next few days. 

 

971497_289797154500041_1583280131_nThis is the conclusion of our series on golden ales. I’ve defined golden ales as a subset of what some might call light or blonde ales (and what the BJCP labels blonde ales) with the following attributes: Moderately dry. Malt character almost entirely from a high quality base malt (and often with a grainy edge). Not lacking in hop character (in fact, the malt/hop balance can be tipped slightly towards hops).

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Golden Ale (II: Malts and Mashing)

November 27, 2013 by 2 Comments
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Amber waves of grain. Robust (6-row) barley growing in my garden.

Golden ales are balanced, but this balance can be shifted slightly towards either ingredient. Even with the hoppiest golden ales, the malt character is important. As I mentioned in the intro to this series, I’m not going to try to describe every type of beer that is labeled as a light ale, blonde ale or golden ale. (For example, I’m not going to cover the sweetish, not very bitter blonde ales made from Pilsner malt and a sizable addition of Carapils.)

The golden ales I am going to describe have a delicious malt flavor that comes both from ingredient selection and how the grains are handled. These beers are not intensely malty, as with a Maibock or similar pale lager, but show a pleasing grainy malt character balanced with sufficient hop bitterness and flavor to avoid being insipid. Coupled with reasonably high attenuation from the yeast, this yields a crisp ale with a dry and hoppy aftertaste. To a large degree, the type of golden ale I describe is similar to the Catamount Gold of the late 1990s, and other good, balanced, malty/grainy light ales found in some brewpubs.

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