BeerBorg

I brewed this back in February - it's been 6 months in the secondary, and will probably keg it in October. Patiently waiting...

3 gallon batch

11 lbs 2-row
1.0 lbs Caramel 120
0.5 lbs Special B
0.25 lbs Aromatic
3.3 lbs Maris Otter LME

BIAB - mash at 150 degrees. 90 minute boil.

1.0 Chinook (60 min)
1.0 Williamette (20 min)

Yeast: cake from my session IPA

IBU: 30.9
SRM: 24.6

Wow...such a simple recipe. I'm not all that familiar with barleywines, but I thought they much more complicated than that.

Lagerpmp, I brewed my Barleywine around the same time early this year. It was gone in 6 months...you are patient my friend.

I had a similar recipe, I based it off your Alpha Kind clone. It was pretty good but I never gave it a fair chance because it never aged like it should have. I wish I would have kept some of the bombers I bottled up.

Dry hopped this yesterday with an ounce of Nugget hops, and the sample I pulled was outstanding. I will keg this next weekend.

Kegged this today. Clocking in at 10.8% ABV, this will be a sipper during the holidays. I might take a growler or a bomber to the in laws on thanksgiving day.

Well... Not too happy with this one. Way too much alcohol presence, and has a solventy off flavor. Hoping it improves in the keg after a few more weeks, but doubting it at this point.

I've done a couple of higher ABV recipes in the past, and I've noticed the alcohol presence early on too. They mellowed out over time and the alcohol went away. Hopefully yours does too.

LagerPMP wrote:Well... Not too happy with this one. Way too much alcohol presence, and has a solventy off flavor. Hoping it improves in the keg after a few more weeks, but doubting it at this point.

That comes from getting too warm during fermentation. A common problem with barley wines because the fermentation is so vigorous it raises the temperature of your beer up to 10 degrees. Doing big beers is when you need some method of cooling your fermenter.

BlackDuck wrote:Wow...such a simple recipe. I'm not all that familiar with barleywines, but I thought they much more complicated than that.

One of the guys on the AHA forum brews his as SMaSH beers with just Munich. Barley wines don't have to be complicated at all.

LagerPMP wrote:Well... Not too happy with this one. Way too much alcohol presence, and has a solventy off flavor. Hoping it improves in the keg after a few more weeks, but doubting it at this point.

BlackDuck wrote:I've done a couple of higher ABV recipes in the past, and I've noticed the alcohol presence early on too. They mellowed out over time and the alcohol went away. Hopefully yours does too.

Gymrat wrote:That comes from getting too warm during fermentation. A common problem with barley wines because the fermentation is so vigorous it raises the temperature of your beer up to 10 degrees. Doing big beers is when you need some method of cooling your fermenter.

Yeah, when I have done high alcohol brews they can often have a "hot alcohol" taste for at least the first few months.

But I think a real solvent flavor is not the same. I had a mead start tasting like turpentine because I let it sit at too warm temps.

With Big Belgians you can avoid this hot alcohol stuff and end up with a good to drink brew sooner by starting your fermenting wort at 1.060 or there about, pitching a hefty amount of yeast, and then feeding all the gravity points you want above that as fermentation progresses. This allows the yeast to adapt to the wort conditions more gradually. Of course usually those feedings are sugar. But there isn't any reason you could not dissolve some DME or LME in small amounts of water and feed that too. Doing it as AG would of course be a hella lot trickier, but it could be done with some thick mashes boiled down into syrup. That would potentially give you lots of cool flavors too, which would be good in a scotch ale at least. Just depends on what your into I guess.

I think we often tend to over complicate recipes simply because we can. There are tons of grain variations out there that brewers didn't have "back in the day".

Some of that alcohol presence should fade over time. I did a 9+% Maibock with all base grains. Fermentation was kept low based on activity level, not temperature, and gradually bumped up to the desired fermentation temp. Sometimes you can be at your desired temp or temp range, but activity is just too damn busy to be a "clean" fermentation.

Hey this has gotten much better after the first few samples from the keg. It was pretty harsh in the beginning, not sure but has also happened with some other brews for me. But now it has turned into what I was expecting... Boozy, molasses, toffee and dried fruit. Yay!