I got an O2 kit for Christmas and plan to use it for the first time on my first Barleywine. Right now my recipe is at 1.102 for a 2.88 gallon batch. I don’t want to make a full 5G of this stuff! I plan to repitch some WLB037 from a 1.050 Nut Brown Ale. My questions:
How long should I aerate ~3 gallons of 1.102 wort with O2?
Should I re-aerate after a couple of days? How many and for how long?
Should I add more slurry after a few days? If yes, how many days?
Thanks! Anything else I should be considering, please add!
I think a loose ROT could be 1-2 seconds per gallon? Re-aerating not sure about and maybe not recommended. I pitched an entire additional fresh slurry of 001 my last high gravity ferment (1.106) when the brew got below 1.050 as insurance. It was below 1.010 at the final reading.
Just chugged along and took about 2 weeks at 70-ish temps.
For big beers I oxygenate for 2 minutes for a 5 gal batch. I have never re-oxygentated but there are plenty of people who do. For barleywines I rack the wort onto the yeast from a previous low-gravity beer and have never had a problem with the beers attenuating.
The only other I would add is monitor your fermentation temperature and don’t let it get out of the 60s. When making a beer with this amount of sugar fermentation can really take off.
With pure O2, I would let it run for 60-90 seconds. At such a high gravity, it wouldn’t hurt to aerate again after 12-24 hours. As far as repitching slurry, I’d say it’s better to just pitch the appropriate amount upfront. mrmalty.com has a calculator for slurry pitching rate.
The figure I see is 1 minute of aeration at a flow rate of 1 liter O2/minute. The means you need a flow meter of course, but time isn’t really a measure of how much O2 goes into the wort.
Adding more slurry after a few days is useless if you think about it. Your yeast has gone through the growth phase at that point. It has reproduced many times over and there are billions of cells in there. Adding a few million more is not going to make a difference. Also, if you thought it did need help, it would have been better to add them at the beginning so they could multiply with the rest of the yeast cells.
I’ve never had a problem with beer that big attenuating as long as it’s pitched on the cake of a smaller beer. I’ve gotten great attenuation with yeasts such as Windsor, which is not necessarily a great attenuator.
I’ve never done additional aeration after fermentation begins.
As far as not making a small batch, I say do the whole 5 gallons. Bottle it and age it.
I’ve found with my strong ales that they are always gone sooner than I would like, even though I cracked a the last bottle of a 2006 barleywine on Christmas eve.
Thanks for the replies. I planned on a monster pitch upfront and actually a little more than what Mr Malty says being it’s slurry. I’ll leave it at that and come back if there are any issues!
MTN-Where do I go about getting a flow meter?
Joe-You may have just talked me in to the full 5G batch! I was just the recipient of 3 free cases of Grolsch bottles so I can afford to tie up 2 of them for a while since I mostly keg.
I usually do 1 minute per 5 gallons of ale, 2 for lagers or big beers. You can re-oxygenate up to 24 hours later. I don’t have a flow meter. I just turn it up until the bubbles start coming.
I wouldn’t trust the Grolsch bottles myself.
And do you have a way to control the fermentation temperature? Lots of yeast with lots of sugar and oxygen make lots of heat.
I use them all the time and have some that are quite old. Replacement seals come in bags of 100 or so and are relatively cheap. I am a big fan of these bottles, though if bottling off the keg I prefer to use cappable bottles with oxy caps.
I was more thinking that with extended ageing the seal might dry up while the beer is still in there. for shorter storage periods I have no problem at all with the flip tops used to use them all the time before I started just saving commercial empties.
This seems like more of a perceived risk to me than a real one. IME, I have never had carbonation problems with Grolsch bottles and they seal well enough for bottles to crack when they are overcarbed.
If the rubber gasket is dried out, it will be obvious. I haven’t had any dried gaskets that I can recall except when I received a batch of OLD bottles that hadn’t been used in maybe 20 years.
You might as well just give advice to say “don’t use chipped or cracked bottles or rusty caps.”
I think brand new or newer gaskets will be just fine for many years. I’ve never had a problem in 20 years with them. I don’t expect any for the Barleywine. I’m still buying all new ones though for this batch…
In years of putting beer in my checked baggage, the only leak I’ve had was from a flip-top bottle. The glass didn’t break, cap was still on, but the pressure in the bottle (and lack of pressure in cargo) pushed the beer right passed the seal. I wound up with a closed bottle of beer in a zip-lock bag full of beer.
So I have this 1.100 Barleywine fermenting at 61F. It’s steady but not going crazy. The plan is to leave it here until the activity slows dramatically, then raise to 65F and burn it out at 68F. Good plan?
