Tag Archives: barleywine

Bottling Barleywine and Cider

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We bottled our barleywine and cider this weekend.  Since it was Obama’s second inauguration day, we used a couple of kitschy tea towels we picked up at his first inauguration to dry out bottle caps and equipment after sanitizing.

The gravity of the barleywine had not changed since I moved it to secondary, so we probably could have just bottled it after two weeks.  Many of the comments about the yeast mentioned how fast it ferments, and I guess they were right.  Barleywine is traditionally aged for ridiculous amounts of time, so we’ve tucked the bottles in the back of a closet, keeping only a handful of small bottles in the pantry to test whether it’s ready.

We tasted samples of the four batches of cider/cyser.  The first batch (plain juice) was nice and dry, lots of good apple character without being juicy at all.  The second batch (juice plus concentrate) was fine when I had a sip of the sample I used to check the gravity, but was decidedly off when we tasted a sample from the end of bottling.  So we’re not sure if it’s just a problem with the dregs or if the whole batch might be off.  The third batch (juice plus honey) was a very interesting cider/mead combination, with a lot of the cider character of the first batch, but also the floral and reedy/bready notes of mead.  But the last batch (juice plus twice as much honey) was the most promising — it was a little sweeter, much more pronounced mead flavor, with the cider tartness really fading to the background.

Knights of the Barleywine

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Our local brewery held their second annual Knights of the Barleywine event today — they made a high-gravity barleywine mash and a couple dozen or homebrewers setup propane burners in the parking lot to brew.  My normal inclination, when presented with an all-pale ale mash clocking in at 1.100 SG, would be to use a Belgian yeast and make a quad.  But we just kegged one of those, so we wound up deciding on a more traditional English ale yeast, and East Kent Goldings for flavor and aroma hops (though still considerably less than what many people use for barleywine).

This was my first time brewing outdoors on a propane burner.  After a slow start, I was comfortable cranking up the gas and getting a quick and steady boil.  It was a lot of fun hanging out and chatting with the other brewers.  And pretty much everybody brought some homebrew to sample, so I tasted a few barleywines from last year, plus pale ale, cream ale, Scotch ale and even a Raspberry saison.  We speculated that we collectively brewed about 100 gallons (3 barrels).  There was several pallets of spent grain like this one.