Anniversary Barleywine

To celebrate our anniversary on January 3rd, we have made a barelywine with the plan not to crack one open until our next anniversary. Instead of making a normal batch of 5 gallons, we scaled Denny's Old Stoner recipe down to 3 gallons with an OG of 1.125. If the fermentation is good, that should yield a beer of about 12-13% alcohol, which is strong enough to last a year. A possible problem of beer sitting for one year is oxygen seeping into the bottles through the caps and causing off flavors. To hopefully avoid this, we are going to dip the tops of the bottles in wax to make an oxygen barrier.

Because the barelywine has such a high gravity, a much larger amount of yeast was needed to fully ferment the beer. To make sure we pitched enough yeast, we used the yeast cake from a previous batch of beer. We racked the beer off the yeast cake and poured the barleywine on top. It started to bubble with in a few hours. This was the first time we have tried anything like this, but anytime we need to make a high gravity beer, I think we are going to brew a smaller lower gravity beer and then use the yeast cake for the high gravity ale.

With making such strong beer, we only used the first runnings from the mash to make the barelywine, so we did a partigyle where the second runnings were used to make a "small beer." I added some more malts to the mash when the water for the second runnings was added to make a darker beer. The OG was only 1.040 (much much smaller than the barelywine), but it should make for a good easy drinking session beer. We have no idea what the small beer is going to taste like or what style is resemebles. We basically lightly hopped it with some left over hops we had in the freezer, so it will probably be similar to an English ESB; except it was fermented with an american ale yeast. Hopefully the beer turns out to be drinkable because the only cost for the small beer was 1 oz of willamette hops and 1.5 lbs of speciality grains for a total of about $5.