Barleywine is too sweet.

[devinjames]

So i made a barleywine about 2 months ago and kegged it last week and it is sickeningly sweet. Is this too be expected before its given time to age?

Heres my recipe:
12 lb malt extract
3 lb 2 row
8 oz special b
4 oz 40L crystal
4 oz 80L crystal
2 oz magnum (at 60 min)
1 oz columbus (at 60 min)
1 oz columbus (at 30 min)
1 oz cascade (at 10 min)
1 oz cascade (at flameout)
california V ale yeast for primary
champagne yeast for secondary

Do you think the sweetness is inherent to my recipe or that just how a barleywine is in its infancy?

[Jidas]

no, it should get sweeter when you age it due to the bitterness dropping out. Sounds like it finished at a high gravity. What was your starting and ending gravity and how much yeast did you pitch? Fermentation temp?

[devinjames]

my dumbass forgot to get a temperature reading so my OG was useless, because of this i didnt take a FG.

I used on vial of california V and a small packet of champagne yeast and it fermented at about 65-70 F.

nobody is going to want to drink this. ive never had so much trouble with a style, this is barleywine failure #2.

[Mills]

Great time to start blending! Brew up a big dry IIPA and blend the two kegs.

You have some options. You are extract right? Add 20% sugar as part of your IIPA recipe to dry it out. Or you could crush a lb or two of two row and do a minimash with the two row and your rehydrated wort at 147 for an hour. Or you could rehydrate your extract and toss some beano in it and let it reat for a while. All of these things are meant to give you a more fermentable final wort.

Hope that helps.

Mills

[JohnF]

That yeast tends to leave a fairly sweet barleywine. I believe Ben Miller uses it for his barleywine but then follows it with an active starter of the Chico yeast a few days into fermentation.

IME, using wine yeast on beer never works out well. They have high alcohol tolerance but don't seem to ferment wort well enough to do anything behind a beer yeast. So I think a stronger fermenting beer yeast to dry it out would have worked better.

I think if you want to make good barleywine, you are going to have to make a starter.

At this point, you could try making a 2 liter 1056/001 starter and pitch it at high krausen (12 hours later or so) into the keg and keep it warm for about a week. If that doesn't work, nothing will.

[CRBrewHound]

You really have to pitch a butt load of yeast cells to get barley wines to finish out (especially the huge 12% and above) If you go to Mr.Malty.com and put in the numbers it will tell you that you need like 8 or 10 smack packs/vials to do them without a starter. Even with a starter it tells you that you need 3 or 4 packs with a gal starter. Now these are optimal numbers so you can get by with less and still finish out. but that give you an idea how much work it is for the yeast to consume all that sugar.

[snowcapt]

I have only made one BW and I put it on to a big fat Neo Britannia yeast cake. Finished beautifully. I didnt add any yeast at bottling and it pours great. I made an ESB and used the cake from it. Give that a try if you are comfortable with your sanitation.

[Bugeater]

I am notorious for making big beers. A couple things tend to cause the barleywine to be too sweet. The big one I see in your case is the use of malt extract. Malt extract, especially LME, tends to have quite a bit of unfermentable sugar. You need to have a couple pounds of sugar as part of your fermentables in place of some of the extract in order to counteract those long chain sugars.

The yeast is another problem. Actually two potential problems. The first is the size of the yeast pitch. My normal procedure is to brew a smaller beer ( <1.060 gravity ) so I can use most of that yeast cake to ferment the barleywine. Doing just a starter or (heaven forbid) just a smackpack or vial will be drastically underpitching. The high starting gravity creates high osmotic pressure which damages the yeast cells. You want to be able to kill off a bunch of yeast cells and still have plenty survivors to ferment the sugars.

A second yeast problem is that of racking off the yeast cake too early. The early Charlie Papazian books have left folks with a fear of leaving the beer on the yeast too long. As a result, the "conventional wisdom" is that you rack to secondary after a week. You don't want to take that much yeast out of a barleywine that early. Four or five weeks for a big beer like that will not cause a problem with off tastes from the yeast. The BW needs all the help it can get for as long as possible.

Oxygenation at the beginning of fermentation is also critical. Shaking the carboy is not enough for a big beer like this. At a minimum, use an aquarium pump to force air in there for fifteen minutes or so at the time you pitch. Another dose of air or 02 at 18-20 hours will also help.

You don't have a lot of options at this point for fixing this beer. You can try the high krausen yeast trick, but your best bet is time. Over the space of a year, I often have a barleywine drop another 6-8 points sitting in a keg at room temperature. Don't worry about hops fading, you can still dry hop after a year of aging.

If all else fails, you can always blend with an imperial IPA.

Hope this gives you a couple things to think about. Now get started on your next big beer.


Wayne