Knocking out an English Barleywine in a few weeks. Looking to use WLP007 Dry English. Does anyone have recommendations based on yeast successes or failures via ~12.5% strong ales? Any advice will help, seeing as this will be my first mega brew.
More than the yeast strain, I hear that mash temp is critical to set up the yeast for success - low and long. But for an English style BW, you can finish it with some Champagne yeast, if the yeast selected happen to poop out. The 12.5% ABV is pretty high for most standard English yeast strains, but they may be up to the task.
WLP 1028 is not a bad choice.
I guess WLP 099 is English Strong Ale strain FWIW…all the way to 25% ABV, supposedly.
I’m currently planning to mash at 151. When formulating my recipe, BeerSmith says I should hit 1.026 FG. Then again, you really can never nail the FG perfectly with bigger beers. Only about 9% specialty grains, so I’m thinking that will also help the attenuation.
Got a recipe? 1.026 sounds kinda high. I would mash at 148 for 90-120 minutes
mash at 148 and skip the specialty grains is my suggestion. 12.5 is fine for dry english. I’ve done that without trouble in the past.
I’ve always stuck with wlpoo7 for my English style barley wines and have great success with that strain for that style.
I personally find that the sweet spot for English BW is 9-10%. Much higher than this I find them less enjoyable. But then again, I’m not a fan of many beers over 10%.
He has not said what the OG was. A FG of 1.026 is in the range for a beer that starts at 1.100+. I brewed one 3 weeks back that had an OG of 1.115, and used Wyeast 1028. I might rack to a keg today, and will see what the FG is. Will report back when I know. It was a Thomas Hardy clone.
+1. You wouldn’t want an unusually dry barley wine. Most of my RIS starting over 1.100 finish above 1.020. An OG wort that starts at 1.100 and finishes at 1.020 would be 80% aa, which is probably about as dry as you would want.
FWIW, my last 1.100 BW finished at 1.023 IIRC. I thought it was about the perfect FG for that beer - not too sweet, not unusually dry.
I’m doing a partigyle mash:
First runnings - Barleywine OG: 1.110 (46 IBUs)
Second runnings - Alt OG: 1.055 (35 IBUs)
Grist:
28# MO
2# Biscuit
1# Special B
1/2# 40L
1/2# 80L
1/2# 120L
1/2# Chocolate [add for Alt vorlauf/sparge]
Looking through the description, Wy1028 may be a perfect fit. I’ve changed some things around and dropped some #'s of base malt so that my gravity isn’t so high. Had to sleep on it a little.
this is also something of a personal preference but a 46 IBU barley wine is going to taste sweet almost no matter what the FG is. even english barley wine needs a solid hop bitterness to balance all that sweetness from the alcohol not to mention the residual sugars I would aim for closer to 80 for that beer but again, personal preference. I don’t care for sweet barley wine that much.
+1. And by the time it ages a bit, that bitterness will fade some too.
Couple of things strike me as off. That’s a hell of a lot of crystal malt and that won’t taste anything like an alt, though it may be a fine beer non-the-less.
I was basing my IBUs off North Coast Old Stock (~34 IBUs), which is a beer I really love, since I’ve never really made a huge BW before.
Even with MO as the base, as opposed to Pils, it’s way off from an Alt. I know that and I wasn’t necessarily trying to hit the Alt style perfectly, but I figured it would be something fun to play with since I’ve got some 1007 on hand. I was torn doing a Nut Brown too, which would obviously be better as a second runnings with my grist.
My thought as well.
Something else to consider with the partigyle is that a big beer usually has worse efficiency than your normal beer so if you are planning your recipe around 70-80% efficiency you will probably hit 55-70% in reality, which may not leave you a lot of fermentable sugar for the partigyle. You can keep sparging to try to improve efficiency but once the runnings get low gravity you start increasing the risk for tannin extraction.
Alt or not, call it what you want. But for any beer 2.5 lbs of crystal is too much per 10 gallon batch. You will already have cloying qualities in your BW due to left over unfermentable sugars. IME what you are creating here is going to be overly cloying, sweetish and not very drinkable. Consider cutting the crystal in half, at least.
TH Clone? Recipe please 
The main keys are oxygenation, fermentability of your wort, and a HUGE pitch of yeast. Honestly, 12.5% isn’t terribly high for an ABV. I think most yeast strains can handle it, but some will be more attenuative than others.
My most recent barleywine was 100% MO with an OG of 1.142 and finished at 1.024, for an abv in the 15.5%-18% range (depending on which calculation you use). I used the WLP037 (Yorkshire Square), and pitched on about 2/3 of the cake from a 1.056ish brew.
I agree with you in regards to the Alt being too much crystal, which is why I was toying with doing a brown instead. Additionally, I’ve made great beers with 2.5# of crystal without being cloyingly sweet. In the grand scheme of the grist, I think it’s still a small percentage. We each have our own preferences though.