No, this isn’t a “my barleywine is bigger than yours” thread. But I was wondering how high everyone would be comfortable pushing the limits for an OG on a beer that used no simple sugars or incremental feeding or anything else of that sort. In other words, at what point would you be concerned that the OG would be so high that the beer had little chance at finishing out at a drinkable FG, and is more likely to stall out at the “alcoholic malt syrup” stage.
Here’s my scenario that has me thinking about this. For my next beer I am brewing a barleywine using an iterated mash. Basically, for a 3-gallon batch, I am planning on mashing 8 lbs of grain around 160F (for a high Alpha rest), then pulling the grain bag, and replacing it with 8 more pounds of grain. I’m hoping this will get me down to Beta rest temps (148ish), where I will hold for a long mash to max out fermentability.
I’m using 60% as a ballpark effiency, which would give me something in the 1.125 range for an OG. The thing is, I’ve gotten as high as 86% efficiency on barleywines using 8 lbs of grain in the mash before. If that happens, then I’d be up over 1.170 for my OG. Even with a big pitch of yeast, followed by a second active starter pitched 7 days later, I have a hard time imagining that this would finish as low as I’d want.
What would you use for your upper limit for the OG on an all-malt barleywine?
I’m afraid to think about a 1.170 barley wine. I wouldn’t personally want to go much over 1.1 all malt, maybe 1.11 but I don’t know about that. figure ~70% AA and your still looking over 1.030 FG. maybe with a metric butt load of hops?
My highest was 1.137 for an all grain barleywine and it finished about 100 points lower than that. Even with a high fg, it was amazing after aging an a mini bourbon barrel. I did mash at 148F for almost 2 hours and needed to pitch an additional slurry from a brewpub to shave off the last few points.
That said, if I had to guess, I would be very surprised if you would be in any danger of approaching the theoretical OG of 1.170 without extended boiling because first runnings tend to max out at a certain point and you would really having a hard time rinsing additional sugars from the mash if you aren’t sparging and the solution is already saturated with sugar.
I ended up with an OG of 1.142 on this one. Just took my FG reading and I got down to 1.024. I’m not sure how much the step-down mash helped, but I can’t complain with this level of attenuation.
Whew! That is impressive. My biggest was 1.111, brewed on 11/11/11. It has just started to come into its own! That one was all Golden Promise. I have decided since that my sweet spot is 1.085- even with sugar. But that may just be me.
Just bumping this one last time as I finally have a proper sample to taste that has been chilled and carbonated. Man, this is good already. I’m really going to have to fight the urge to sit on it for a couple of years for it to age. Lots of MO bread crust going on, with some toffee and caramel. There’s some nice stonefruit esters from the Yorkshire Square yeast strain. There’s also a nice bit of acidity to help balance the viscous mouthfeel. It’s definitely sweet, but not as syrupy as something like Thomas Hardy. I already get a bit of fig, but this one is going to rock once it gets a little age on it and starts to develop more of that dark fruit.
