We’re brewing four batches to fill a 13.5 gallon Dry Fly Wheat Whiskey barrel! That should give us enough (~16 gallons or so) to fill the barrel and have extra to top off and maybe keep some as a control batch.

For our barrel project we decided on the recipe from The Homebrewer’s Recipe Guide that we used on our first test batch.

Results

Overview

• Starting gravity (actual)
  • oops! 1.104?
• Starting gravity (expected)
  • 1.079
• Final gravity (actual)
  • 1.028-29
• Final gravity (expected)
  • N/A
• ABV
  • ~9.5-10% ?

Recipe

The recipe for a single batch, with substitutions noted:

Malt and Sugars

• 10 lbs Amber liquid malt extract
• 1lb roasted barley
• 0.5lb 40L+ crystal malt
• 0.25lb chocolate malt
• 0.25lb black patent malt
• 1 qt maple syrup
  (1L bottle Grade A maple syrup from Costco)

Hops

• 4oz Northern Brewer (A=9.6%) (bittering)
  (used Nugget A=13.3%)
  • 60 minutes
• 4oz Fuggle (A=5.7%) (flavoring)
  (used US Saaz A=7.6%)
  • 30 minutes
• 1oz Cascade (aroma)
  (2oz pellet, 2oz leaf)
  • 10 minutes

Yeast

• 1 package Irish Ale yeast
  (we split 6 packages across 4 batches)

Brewing Notes

Timeline

• Brewed on
  • April 20, 2013
• Transferred to secondary
  • N/A
• Transferred to barrel
  • May 11, 2013
• Sampled from barrel
  • June 1, 2013
  • July 3, 2013
• Bottled on
  • August 12, 2013
  • August 19, 2013 (vanilla bean)
• Tasted from bottle (flat)
  • August 14, 2014

Four simultaneous brew stations! Offset by ~20 minutes each.

10 lbs of liquid malt extract for each batch! And of course we had a boil-over (but only one!).

We split the four batches across five carboys. Most were 5-gallon carboys, which didn’t hold a full batch during primary fermentation of our earlier test batch.

All tucked in for a good nights sleep? Not exactly. We probably should have known better than to use an airlock on such a big beer! Unfortunately, we were short one blowoff tube and had to get an emergency blowoff tube to avoid an overnight disaster.