Saturday, January 14, 2012

Barleywine - Bottling and First tasting

I is finally time to bottle my barleywine! 3 months ago, I used almost 1/2 bag of maris otter to brew up almost 5 gallons of barleywine and 5 gallons of English bitter.
For that brew day, I used the partigyle technique. After mashing the grain, the first runoff has most of the sugars. This becomes your stronger beer. You can then rinse the grains with more water to get a second weaker beer. In a normal batch, these two runnings would be combined for one average beer.
This is when bath sparging - some people use fly sparging, which is more of a continuous rinse. The same can be done with the first half going to one beer and the second to the other beer. Some people go as far as making a third smaller beer.
Anyway, back to the barleywine. Since the brew day back in October I have been waiting patiently as it fermented and aged.  It has spent the last few days kegged so I could force carbonate and chill it for easier bottling. Yes it is possible to bottle condition a beer this strong, but I did not want to take the chance of flat beer. It is now time for bottling and tasting!
At 3 months, it is still quite young - especially for a 12-13% barleywine, but I thought it would be a good time for the first tasting.

Appearance:  Clarity is poor.  Forms a small wisp of a head.
Aroma:  Aroma of malt and alcohol.  Similar to Belgian dubble. Slight dark fruits - maybe prunes?
Taste:  Dark fruit-malt type flavors with some alcohol.  No hops, but sweet/bitter is balanced.
Mouth feel:  Medium body with low-medium carbonation - Perfect for a strong sipping ale.
Overall:  Definitely a sipper, but surprisingly smooth for such a young almost 13%abv beer.
 Amazing how much this reminds me of Belgian dubble/quad considering English malt, hops and yeast.  And no sugar.

This beer is meant to age.  I will be slowly eating into this stockpile over the next few years - mmmm.

1 comment:

  1. Recipe Here: http://hopville.com/recipe/902516/english-barleywine-recipes/bw-partigyle---barleywine

    ReplyDelete