Barleywine

2/1/06 - Barleywine - Ye Olde Barleywine. Once again we were interested in playing with the hop profile of this beer. Last year we ended up dropping the IBU's to 80, which we found to be just about right. The aspect we decided to play around with this year was late-addition hops. I've always loved having that bouquet of fresh hops, especially in a beer of this size whose malt profile adds so much character in its own right. The thought (or lack thereof) was to add some pelletized hops into the fermentor after primary before we transferred into a bright tank on top of whole flower hops. My tragic flaw was to try and back flow beer into a keg full of pellets. Once the beer hit the hops the mixture expanded into a slightly damp compact mass of green vegetable matter. Smelled great, but there was no way those hops were heading back into the fermentor. Nothing left to do but empty the sucker. Remember when you were a juvenile delinquent and you lit off snakes behind the elementary school? How the little disc erupted into a cylindrical mess? Imagine the disc being a half barrel and the cylindrical mess being forty-four pounds of Cascades shooting out of the 2 inch opening at the top. Opps, guess I'm still a bit of a JD. We still managed to get some nice hop aroma with seventy-eight pounds of Columbus whole flowers in the bright tank. That came out to be about 1 lb./ bbl of beer. When we first tried the beer there was a definite note of over-ripe peaches (en regalia, as it were).

Malt:
Pilsner Malt
Pale Ale Malt
CaraMunich
Aromatic
Special B.
CaraHell
Brown Sugar

Hops:
IBU 80
Simcoe - Bittering
Santiam & Cascade - Flavoring
Santiam - Aroma
Columbus - Dry Hopping

OG - 23° P
TG - 3.3° P