Barley Wine Collaboration

I’ve been a bit a busy (and a little lazy when it comes to posting to this blog) lately and am a little behind on a couple brew day posts and other posts I’ve been meaning to get up for a bit now, so I’m hoping to get a few more updates up here in the next week or two to catch up. 

A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to brew my first collaboration for the year (this was also the long-overdue first brew that I did with my buddy Dan).  In order for both brewers to gain value from a successful collaboration, it should accentuate the similarities between the brewers, but also force both brewers out of their box a little and teach them something new.  That is something I look for when I pursue doing collaborations.  In the case of Dan and I, we both tend to lean towards American styles, with experimentation mixed in.  In collaborating with Dan, I expected to not just get an exceptionally made traditional beer, but also to try new ingredients and experiment a bit. 

For our first brew together, we landed on barley wine as a style to brew.  This style would serve well as a base to use a variety of treatments on (i.e. different yeasts, dry hopping, oak-aging, etc.).  The idea was to take one base 10 gallon batch and split it into four different variants (5 gallons for each of us, which we each split again into 2.5 gallon batches).  Our goal was to brew a fairly dry (for the style) barely wine that would finish out around 10% ABV. 

When March 18^th rolled around (note to self – in the future, don’t schedule brew days on the day after St. Patty’s Day), I found myself driving down to Delaware, coffee in hand, to start up the brew day at Dan’s place.  After cleaning the equipment, heating the strike water, and grinding the base malt, we were ready to mash.  The 75 minute mash, sparge, and 90 minute boil all went smoothly.  We then kicked off the flame and added some Calypso to steep for a few minutes before chilling, and splitting the wort between our carboys.  Another successful brew was in the books.  Really, the only hitch in the brew day was that we missed our OG by a bit because we over-estimated the amount of boil off slightly.  No big deal; that just means more beer in the end.  :-)

We both ended up going with a starter of California Ale (White Labs 001) for the yeast and let the primary ride out.  The secondary fermentation is really were we took one beer and ended up with four different variants (half of mine was hit with an ounce each of Bravo and Calypso, and the other half got 2oz of American Oak chips soaked in 150ml of Cruzan Single Barrel rum for two weeks).  I am very excited to see how our four different variants will come out in a few months.  We are planning on doing a side-by-side tasting down the line to see how they compare.  It will be a lot of fun to see how the four variants compare to each other in a side-by-side format.  This beer should be perfect for the Fall and Winter (although, I will definitely be sampling a few bottles before then, because I’m impatient).  After tasting my variants when I bottled the beer a couple weeks ago, I was very excited to see how these beers develop with some age.  They dropped down to a pretty dry level for barley wine (FG of about 1.016 for one variant, and 1.017 for the other), which is exactly what we were aiming for.  The oak/rum aged variant is probably my favorite of the two so far, striking a great balance between bitterness, malt, oak, and a touch of rum aroma and flavor.  I can’t wait to sample them after they have conditioned in the bottle for a bit!

Samples of each of my half-batches of barley wine at the time of bottling.

I definitely learned a lot with this brew and got to experience some new hops and malts that I had not used before.  It was also nice to brew on someone else’s system and get some ideas for what kind of setup I want to build for myself when I have the room to upgrade to a true full-boil all-grain setup.  All in all, the brew was a great experience and I will be updating this blog after we do our tasting of the four variants.  We are already planning on doing another brew together.  The next one will probably be a little further out there – probably something along the lines of Theobroma.  A big thanks to Dan for hosting the brew day!

Big Dog Barley Wine

Batch size: 10.0 gal

Boil volume: 11.0 gal

OG: 1.099

FG: 1.025

Bitterness (IBU): 87.6

Color (SRM): 20.1

ABV: 9.7%

[Grains]

Maris Otter Malt    22.000lb    Grain    65.7%

NB Gold LME    6.000lb    Extract    17.9%

Crystal 135-165L (British)    2.000lb    Grain    6.0%

Cane Sugar    1.500lb    Sugar    4.5%

Biscuit    1.000lb    Grain    3.0%

Light DME    1.000lb    Extract    3.0%

[Hops]

Magnum 2.00oz 12.0% AA Pellet @ 60 min, 29.0 IBU

Bravo 2.00oz 15.0% AA Pellet @ 60 min, 36.3 IBU

Magnum 2.00oz 12.0% AA Pellet @ 30 min, 22.3 IBU

Calypso 3.00oz 12.0% AA Pellet @ 0 min, 0.0 IBU

[Yeast/Other]

Irish Moss    1.0 unit(s), Fining 1 tsp at 15 min

California Ale yeast    1.0 unit(s), Yeast

Recipe Notes: This recipe was split into 2 five gallon batches (5 gallons for each of us).  I split my half into two batches at the time of secondary.  One half got an ounce each of Bravo and Calypso hops for a week, and the other half got 2 ounces of American Oak chips soaked in 150ml Cruzan Single Barrel rum for two weeks.

Song of the Day: “Under and Over It” by Five Finger Death Punch

Beer of the Day: Troegs Nugget Nectar

Small Batch Meads

In the last year, I have been experimenting around a bit with small batches of mead.  I have mentioned this in a few of my posts, but haven’t really gone into it in very much detail.  A lot of people get into mead from homebrewing (if you have the equipment to brew beer, you have most of the equipment you need to make mead).  As such, I figured I would share some of my experiences, recipes, and techniques here, in case anyone wants to get the feet wet and try making mead.

Let me start off by saying that I am definitely not an expert on making mead.  Everything I know about mead, is based off a few rough recipes and articles online and in magazines.  Much like my tips and techniques for homebrewing, take my mead techniques and tips with a grain of salt.  There a ton of techniques and styles for making both mead and beer.  Use techniques and equipment that best fit your preferences and time/space/financial constraints.  There is no “best” technique – simply use the one that works best for you.  The techniques and tips that I suggest here are geared towards someone from a homebrewing background, looking to experiment with making mead.  These techniques work best for me.  Adjust as needed.

Batch Size

Quality honey (the base fermentable for mead) is not cheap.  Mead takes awhile to finish out fermentation and I don’t have tons of space to dedicate to fermenters filled with mead (beer takes priority over mead for me when it comes to fermenter space).  Since mead was not something I know that much about going into my first few batches, there was a decent chance I could mess up a batch.  These are the three main reasons that I chose to keep my batches at a rather small scale – 1-2 gallons.  This allows me to do a 2-3 week primary fermentation in a carboy or bucket fermenter, then transfer the mead to one gallon jugs for secondary fermentation.  After I get more experience with mead and more space (i.e. a house), I plan to up the batch sizes to normal 5 gallon batches.

Finished product of my first mead, made with Clover honey.

Finished product of my second mead, made with South Jersey Pine Barren honey.

My third mead, a melomel, in the carboy on the day of pitching the yeast.

A sample of my melomel on the day of transferring it to 1-gallon jugs for a secondary fermentation.

Start Simple

My recipes have been based roughly on other recipes that I have seen online.  My first two meads, were made with all honey.  This allowed me to get a better feel for the character of different yeasts and honey varieties.  Like most people, there really aren’t many commercially available meads available to me (after all, this isn’t medieval Europe).  As a result, I really didn’t have a baseline of what kinds of meads and honey varieties I liked.  As a result, my first few recipes have been specifically designed to be simple and straightforward. 

Source Quality Honey

“Garbage in” equates pretty well to “garbage out”.  This one is fairly common sense (especially if you brew), but it is worth reinforcing.  Just like brewing, don’t skimp on the quality of ingredients that you use in mead making.  If you make mead with shitty honey, you’re probably going to get shitty mead.  The last couple times I have gotten my honey from local honey makers.  Most farmers markets tend to have a couple vendors that sell honey.  Lacking that, you can usually find decent honey in other grocery stores.  When it comes to adding fruit it to make melomels, source quality fruit, however you can get it.  Fresh is great, but if you can’t get what you need fresh, quality frozen fruit works great too. 

Nutrient Additions

This tip came to me compliments of an episode of Brewing TV on mead.   When making mead, it’s a good idea to add nutrients in multiple stages, rather than just on the day you make it.  I tend to do an addition at the time of pitching the yeast, about 24 hours after pitching the yeast, and another one about 72 hours after pitching the yeast.  This gives the yeast nutrients at multiple stages of its growth and fermentation process, leading to a healthier fermentation.  In theory, this also lets the mead clean up a bit quicker, making the mead drinkable quicker (i.e. instead of having to age for years to get a drinkable product). 

Pasteurizing vs. No-Heat vs. Boiling

There are a few different schools of thought when it comes to whether to heat the mead or not.  One school of thought is to boil the honey mixture to kill off any wild yeast and bacteria.  This method also causes some proteins and solids to break from solution, which allows you to skim them off, theoretically, resulting in clearer, cleaner mead.  Another school of thought is to pasteurize the honey.  This achieves the goal of killing off any wild bacteria or yeast, while preserving more of the delicate aromatics and flavors of the honey in the finished product.  The final school of thought, is the no-heat technique.  The idea on this one is preserve as much of the flavor and aroma of the honey in the finished mead.  There is a slight risk of infection while using this method, but a lot of mead makers believe that this not much of a risk since the cultured yeast that you pitch into the mead will out-compete and clean up any wild bacteria or yeast that may be present.  Personally, I subscribe to the no-heat method, and have had good results so far, with no infections.  I chose this option because it preserves the most of the honey character.  Whichever method you use, you should also factor in any treatments that have occurred to the honey prior to packaging (i.e. pasteurization, filtration, etc.), and adjust to your methods.

Patience, Young Grasshopper

Making mead, even when using staggered nutrient additions, takes longer to get a solid finished product than most beers.  Honey contains sugars that take longer for yeast to break down, requiring it to be fermented longer.  The fermentation regiment for my first few meads was a 2 – 3 week primary fermentation, a 2 – 3 month secondary fermentation, and finally at least a few months of bottle conditioning.  The conditioning time is flexible but I would recommend giving it at least a couple months to let the flavors clean up and come together, before you pop your first bottle.  Your patience will be rewarded.  Don’t expect your mead to be ready in a few weeks like your favorite homebrewed session ale. 

Clarity

There are also a several clarifying agents and methods that can be used to give you’re mead a crystal clear appearance.  These agents will knock out any residual proteins in the mead to clear up the appearance in the glass. I haven’t used any clarifying agents in my meads as of yet, mainly out of simplicity.  My first mead, a hydromel made with clover honey, came out very clear on its own through the normal fermentation bottle conditioning process.  On the other hand, my second mead, made with local South Jersey Pine Barren honey, probably could have used a clarifying agent, but I was still happy with the end result.  You can make great mead either way – use whichever method works best for your preferences.

Recipes

Clover Honey Mead:

-Batch Size: 1 Gallon

-Ingredients:

·         36oz Clover Honey

·         1 Packet Red Star Champagne Yeast

-Observed OG( 6/18/2011): 1.072

-Observed FG (7/2/2011): 0.996

South Jersey Pine Barren Honey Mead:

-Batch Size: 1 Gallon

-Ingredients:

·         3LB South Jersey Pine Barren Honey

·         1 Packet Lalvin EC-1118 Yeast

-Observed OG( 9/3/2011): 1.108

-Observed FG (12/11/2011): 1.000

Mixed Berry Melomel:

-Batch Size: 2 Gallon

-Ingredients:

·         8LB Wildflower Honey

·         5LB Frozen Berry Mix (Blackberries, Blueberries, Raspberries)  

·         1LB Fresh Organic Strawberries (added to half of the batch at secondary)

·         1 Packet Lalvin D-47 Yeast

-Observed OG (3/3/2012): ??? (forgot to get a reading, Probably around 1.200)

-Observed SG1 (3/3/2012): 1.004 (Note: this was taken at the time of transferring to the secondary, not at the time of bottling)

Hope this helps anyone who is in the same position as I am in that is looking to experiment with meads.  I’ll continue to post on mead in the future as I do more.  Until next time, cheers!

Song of the Day: “Paint it Black” by The Rolling Stones

Beer of the Day: Maine Beer Company’s Zoe