Monday, January 4, 2010

Barley Wine (Olde Dog / New Trick)

Today I made up a batch of barley wine which I'm calling Olde Dog (New Trick) Barley Wine.  Until now, the strongest ale I've made is my Chocolate Oatmeal Stout which was only around 7% abv, so this is a big step up.  The recipe I'm using calls for 10lbs of LME and a pound of Belgian Candi Sugar.  It also requires a high gravity yeast as a 2 pint starter fermenting for at least 24 hours.

When we were putting everything away from the brewstore, one of the bags of candi sugar ripped open, so I put it in a ziplock freezer bag.  The other two got a little wet, so the sticker with the price got wet and came off.  For some reason, I just assumed the candi sugar was explicitly for the barley wine and put all 3 bags in...only to find out that both the Imperial Russian Stout and Stone Ruination Clone require a pound each!  So that means I put 3lbs of candi sugar into a 5 gallon batch of barley wine.  My OG was 1.100, and potential alcohol content is up around 10-12%.  Here is a video of fermentation on the second day:



Athena was a little bummed when she went to make her IRS and there was no candi sugar left, but we hadn't made the yeast starter for her batch yet so it all worked out.

Right now we have Athena's Honey Brown Ale in Secondary, Barley Wine in primary, and the IRS yeast starter almost 24 hours in.

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