Beer Forum

I going to brew jamil English barley wine from his BCS book . My ? Is how he state the fermentation for this beer he say to ferment at 68f an raise the ferment temp to 70f over the last third .Now i know one would have to take hydrometer reading almost daily to see if there at the last third. I just wanting to know can ou just jude it by days i do know there a lot of thing's to take in to count

The 2º change cant make that much difference, other than ensure that the temp doesn't go down at the same time the yeast start petering out. If it were me I would just bump up the temp when that airlock slows to one a minute.

It doesn't have to be exactly 1/3. The closer the better, but I would wait til airlock activity starts to slow & take your reading from there. If it's close enough, start raising, otherwise I'd just estimate. It's easier after you've brewed the recipe a few times & can anticipate how it's going to act.

I've found that the majority of fermentation flavor comes in the first few days. I see two reasons for ramping temps. Keeping it cool and controlled at first to limit off flavors, and increasing toward the end to prevent the yeast from going dormant before their job is done. But still, there's not much difference between 68 and 70, so it seems that he was just giving a bit of insurance against premature stalling. It would also be imperative to have solid temp control with this method. If you were only measuring ambient temp rather than beer temp, the beer will be much warmer than 68 then drop to below 70. Starting at 68 and raising to 70 (actual beer temp) would be significantly better than ambient 68 raising to ambient 70.

That being said, I think I would take it a step further and pitch at 60, and walk it up one degree per day to 70.

I would ferment it exactly as the book says. I pitch & ferment low on most beers, but not on an English Barleywine.

To the OP, what yeast will you be using? What is your plan for pitching the yeast?How are you controlling fermentation temperature?If you can provide a little more information we can give you better advice. If it's not a highly flocculant yeast I wouldn't worry too much about following the fermentation schedule exactly. If you pitch in the mid 60's it will probably be 68 by the time fermentation begins.

You can usually start bumping up the temperature after the krausen has peaked and starts falling mostly back into the beer.

brewinhard wrote:You can usually start bumping up the temperature after the krausen has peaked and starts falling mostly back into the beer.

This