Anniversary Barleywine 2012

Today we brewed the 3rd vintage of our Anniversary Barleywine. I tried to change things up a little bit this year with the mash schedule. Previously, we would use all of the water we needed for the whole batch (i.e., no-sparge brewing). Some say the beer is "fuller and more malty" when you dont sparge, but you lose a lot of efficiency by not rinsing the grains. This year, to increase the efficiency, I not only sparged, but I also boiled in our larger kettle which has a larger boil-off rate. All of this allowed me to use more water and potentially increase the efficiency.

The first photo is a picture of the technique known as First Wort Hoping (FWH) in which hops are added before the boil. Normally, boiling liberates the the flavor and aroma compounds in hops, but hot temperatures can do this as well. By adding the hops before the boil, FWH gives a smooth bitterness and although they are boiled for the length of the boil time, they only contribute bitterness comparable to 20 min hop additions.

I was able to increase my efficiency from 56% last year to 69% this year. However, there was some issues that I cant figure out that caused me to have a final volume of 4 gallons instead of 3 gallons. The gravity on this batch was the lowest yet, 1.100 (last year 1.119) which should give a beer ~10%. Lower than we want, as we would like something at least above 11%, but at least the efficiency was better. We'll see how it tastes next year to see if we will continue to sparge or return to no-sparging.



This was also the first time we were able to use our new oxygenation kit. Instead of shaking, we pumped pure oxygen for about 30 seconds into the beer (the red can is oxgyen bought from Home Depot). We also re-used yeast from the IPA, so hopefully with the newly harvested yeast and the dose of pure oxgyen we'll get a really good fermentation.

I'm very excited about the oxygen kit as many people who have been brewing for a long time say they brewed 'better' tasting beer once they started using the oxygen. Most of them could not pin what was better about the beer, but they noticed a positive difference. Hopefully we'll see these benefits too.

On Saturday, Dave, our neighbor, and I are going to make another 10 gallon batch to split of a black IPA. The recipe is a clone recipe of Stone's Sublimely Self-righteouss, our favorite commercial black IPA. This is another beer with a ton of hops, Simcoe and Amarillo, and we are very excited about trying this one in a month or so.