Batch 034: Hell's Grannies
We're brewing our first barleywine. We're continuing our streak of naming beers after bits of Monty Python skits, and because, by the time of Monty Python, barleywine had become a drink sold in small bottles to little old ladies in Britain, we're calling this batch Hell's Grannies. This being the holiday season, it's going to (hopefully) be a dark, nicely spiced winter ale.
Ingredients in this batch
- 4.48 lb CBW® Bavarian wheat liquid malt extract.
- 9.9 lb CBW® Pilsen Light liquid malt extract.
- 0.5 lb Special "B" malt, ground.
- 0.5 lb Chocolate malt, ground.
- 1 oz. Magnum hop pellets (generic packaging from the local homebrew store) at 60 minutes.
- 1 oz. Warrior hop pellets (from YCH Hops) at 30 minutes.
- 1 oz. Horizon hop pellets (from YCH Hops) at 30 minutes.
- 1 oz. Warrior hop pellets (from YCH Hops) at 15 minutes.
- re-used yeast from batch 027, which we had just bottled (that yeast was White Labs WLP001).
- Distilled water to total brew size of 5 gallons.
- On bottling day:
- Dissolved in enough heated, unfiltered tap water to make 2 total cups:
- ½ c. corn sugar
- ½ tsp. ground McCormick allspice
- ¼ tsp. ground McCormick cloves
- 2 tsp. ground generic cinnamon
- 3 tsp. ground China ginger #1 from Penzeys Spices
- Dissolved in enough heated, unfiltered tap water to make 2 total cups:
BeerXML for this recipe, generated by BrewTarget.
Brew day
Sanitized, sanitized, sanitized. Filtered a little over two gallons of water and heated it, holding it at about 160℉ for twenty minutes while steeping the chocolate and Special B malts, never allowing the water temperature to rise above 170℉. After twenty minutes, removed and discarded the grains, then brought the water to a boil. Dissolved the Bavarian wheat malt extract in the boiling water, stirring, and then added the sixty-minute hop addition. Started the timer and kept stirring occasionally while bottling batch 027. Kept stirring, adding the hop additions at 30 and 15 minutes. At flame-out, added the Pilsen Light malt extract and blended it in. Cooled the wort with an immersion chiller, then added a gallon of water that had been chilling in the freezer during the boil (this brought the wort temperature to 78℉). Poured another gallon of chilled water into the fermentation bucket, on top of the yeast slurry from batch 027, then poured the wert through a strainer into the bucket, This brought it to exactly five gallons. I agitated the wort by stirring vigorously, then pitched the yeast, put on the bucket lid, and popped in a blowoff hose.
Bottling
Took 1½ cups of tap water and heated it in the microwave for 90 seconds, then mixed in the cloves, allspice, cinnamon, ginger, and corn sugar; poured in enough very hot tap water to bring the volume of the mixture to 2 cups, then opened the fermentation bucket and poured in the spices-and-priming-sugar solution. Mixed gently with the large stirring spoon to try to spread it evenly through, then bottled.
Brew day: 30 October 2016
Original gravity: 1.104.
Bottling day: 4 December 2016
Final gravity: 1.039
Estimated ABV: 9%
Yield:
- 27⅔ x 12 oz. bottles
- 1 x 12 oz. bottle, broken when its neck snapped during bottlecap crimping
- 5 x 22 oz. bottles
- 1 x 1 L bottle
- 4 x 500 mL bottles
- 1 hydrometer tube's worth of beer
Total: Approx. 561 fl. oz., or 4.4 gal.
Observations
- 2016-10-31T11:45: There's carbon dioxide discharge from the bucket. It's coming discharging quite rapidly, in fact. Oh, the wonders of reusing a yeast slurry from a previous batch.
- 2016-10-31T18:48: There's foam being pushed gradually into the blowoff hose.
- 2016-11-03T18:53: Foam never did make it all the way to the top of the blowoff hose. Swapped out the blowoff hose for a fermentation lock. There's still quite a bit of carbon dioxide discharge through the fermentation lock, though.
- 2016-12-04: Bottled, yielding almost four and a half gallons.
- 2016-12-20 to 2017-03-20: Have been intermittently dumping out more bottles than I've consumed: it looks like this beer, like batch 027, has some bottles that came out soapy. Sigh.