This is our first test beer as a candidate for barrel aging. The recipe is from The Homebrewer’s Recipe Guide. This is the first time we have used this recipe book.

Results

Overview

• Starting gravity (actual)
  • 1.104!
• Starting gravity (expected)
  • 1.079
• Final gravity (actual)
  • 1.031
• Final gravity (expected)
  • N/A
• ABV
  • ~9.7%

It tastes real good and real boozy!

This might be my favorite beer that we’ve ever brewed.

Recipe

• The book didn’t specify, so we used 10 pounds of liquid malt extract. Otherwise no substitutions.
• Because of the high expected original gravity we used two packages of the Irish Ale Yeast.

Brewing Notes

Timeline

• Brewed
  • November 3, 2012
• Transferred
  • N/A
• Bottled
  • November 23, 2012
• Tasted
  • December 2, 2012 (bottle)
  • February, 2012 (mini-barrel)

• It’s fermenting like crazy!
  Oh. My. God. We left it upstairs for warmer temperature. The carboy temperature reads at the highest 78 degrees (so maybe even higher?). By the morning the carboy had lost over a gallon of volume through the blowoff tube and caused the bucket of sanitized water to overflow. The level in the carboy continues to drop. We only have 5 gallon carboys, so there wasn’t much head space for the krausen.

• Three Different Bottlings
  When bottling, we did half with maple syrup (as the recipe suggested) and half with the standard corn sugar. We also filled a Woodinville Whiskey Co. mini-barrel to age separately.