This post is one in a series following five brewers limiting themselves to a select set of ingredients and brewing several beers each with only those ingredients. The goal of these limitations is to push creativity and to see what can be done within the confines of a single set of ingredients. More about this concept can be found here. The ingredients chosen for this project were Maris Otter, White Wheat (malted), Light Munich, Amarillo, Nugget, WLP810 San Francisco Lager and WLP090 San Diego Super Yeast. The brewer must use all ingredients (with the exception of choosing one yeast strain). The rest of this series can be found here.

Author: C. McKenzie

My first two beers in this Limitations series were certainly nothing spectacular. However, I don’t think that the subpar brews have been due to the limitations themselves, but rather my inability to work well within those defined limitations. The goals of this series, after all, was to push my own bounds of creativity by limiting what I could use without limiting what I could do. I think that these limitations were actually pushing me to find other ways to obtain the flavors I wanted without being able to use a particular ingredient that I knew would give me that effect, but perhaps I just haven’t been able to execute on the quality side of things.

This time, though, I was determined to build a recipe within the given limitations that I would enjoy every pint of. This time, I wanted to do something drastically different than my last two brews. This time, I decided to go big.

Recipe

Thinking through things that I personally wanted to brew and thinking through the ingredients that I had available, I knew I could brew a pale ale or IPA to satisfy my own desire to have something hoppy on hand, but several pale ales and IPAs have already been brewed in this series. So I looked to my list of beers I wanted to brew (yes, I do actually keep a list of beers I want to make on my phone—either when an idea hits or when I just start to get the itch to have a particular style of beer on tap). Then I saw it: barleywine.

The fact that the set of limited ingredients were all base malts was convenient. While wheat and Munich aren’t traditional ingredients in barleywine, Maris Otter certainly is. It wasn’t a hard decision to have a majority of my grain bill made up of Maris Otter, since that is typical of a barleywine grist anyway—at least of the English variety. The other malts were what I had to put some thought into.

A bready character is appropriate for barelywine in reasonable amounts, so I knew I could achieve that with the Munich. That said, I wanted to be careful not to go overboard with it. I figured somewhere close to 15% of the grist would add a good flavor without bringing the character of that malt to the forefront. The wheat was something that I thought could help lighten out the overall feel of this high gravity brew, but that wheat character was also something I didn’t want to be overly prominent. As such, I decided to keep that closer to the 10% mark. I considered making that percentage of the grist even less, but I did want the wheat to contribute at least a bit of character.

With the hops I had at hand, I knew this was going to be more of an American-style barleywine in hop character. Malt is the true star of the show in barleywines, though, so I decided to mostly focus on using the hops to balance the maltiness. I knew I wanted to use some Nugget early in the boil since I would need a large charge of bitterness, and I wanted to use Amarillo later in the boil to get some hop character in the aroma. Those hop additions alone, though, wouldn’t get me the level of bitterness I was after, so I chose to add another addition of both hops right in the middle of the boil to get some bitterness and potentially some additional hop flavor. I wanted to land somewhere just shy of a 1:1 BU:GU ratio (bitterness units to gravity units).

Given my yeast choices, it was obvious that I needed to use WLP090 to achieve what I was after. I had never used this yeast before, but its purportedly high attenuation, alcohol tolerance, and flocculation all seemed appealing for this beer. I wanted this beer to land somewhere around the 10% mark and land close to 1.015-1.020; with those goals and the level of attenuation of WLP090, I decided to shoot for an OG of around 1.100.

I am giving these gravities in target ranges instead of a specific target gravity solely because I had never brewed something of such high gravity on my system, and I didn’t know how it would respond or how my efficiencies would suffer. Therefore, when I decided on these things, I decided on them in a rounded range of numbers. Because of that, I knew I would have to make some on-the-fly adjustments on brew day since my hop utilization would change depending on the actual gravity I achieved, which would probably require some rearrangement of the timing or amount of my hop additions.

All of these considerations resulted in the following recipe:

Mashed at 151°F/156°F (two mashes) 75% Maris Otter (16.5 lbs.) 16% Light Munich (3.5 lbs.) 9% Wheat (2 lbs.)

Boiled for 75 min. 1 oz. Nugget (60 min.) at 13.3% AA (36.6 IBUs) 1 oz. Nugget (30 min.) at 13.3% AA (28.1 IBUs) 1 oz. Amarillo (30 min.) at 8.2% AA (17.3 IBUs) 1 oz. Amarillo (10 min.) at 8.2% AA (8.2 IBUs)

Pitched WLP090 San Diego Super Yeast Fermented at 65°F Raised temperature to 68°F on day 4 Raised temperature to 70°F on day 5

OG: 1.092

FG: 1.020

ABV: 10.3%

Kegged and burst carbonated

Brew Day

Because of the high OG I was targeting for this brew, I started a week ahead of time by making a starter. The packet of yeast I picked up was a little older than I would have liked and looked fairly brown (unfortunately, my LHBS doesn’t normally carry this yeast, so this was a special order and therefore the only packet available). A yeast viability calculator and the look of this yeast prompted enough concern about the vitality of my yeast that I opted to make multiple stepped starters.

The first starter I made was only 1-quart, just to make sure I had healthy yeast and to grow it a little. I then crashed, decanted, and made a 3-quart starter. The yeast starter calculator I used prompted me to want just a little more growth than this second starter would provide, so I poured off a small amount of the starter into a mason jar, crashed that, and then with much less precision than the other starters, used this unknown (but visibly small) amount of yeast to make yet one more 1-quart starter.

Knowing that I would have to use a large amount of grain to make this brew work and get somewhere close to my target numbers, I also knew that after gathering my pre-boil volume of wort I would have a fair amount of leftover sugars available in the grains, I decided to make this my first partigyle brew and try to get an ESB out of the deal too. This is where my system’s limitations come into play, though. My mash tun is a 5-gallon cooler. At maximum, I can fit roughly 12.5 pounds of grain with a liquor to grist ratio of 1.25—nowhere near the amount of grain I’d need to reach the gravity I was looking for unless I brewed a smaller batch.

To compensate for the small mash tun, I knew I would have to run two mashes. I figured I could do this side-by-side to save some time if I used my old 7-gallon kettle to hold the second mash and then transfer the mash into my cooler mash tun in order to lauter. The logistics of everything started to make me worried that I’d forget something if I went in without my plan written down, so I planned out the brew day in 15-minute increments based on my best guesses of when things should be happening.

I knew that this was going to be a longer day than normal, and my estimated plan showed that the second mash/brew would add another 2 hours to the 6 hours that is usually my maximum time spent brewing (I usually only spend this much time brewing and cleaning when things go wrong, e.g., stuck mash). I determined to wake up early, and the night before I made sure all my equipment was clean, my water was gathered and treated, and my equipment was staged and waiting.

The next morning I had the flame lit under my kettle before the sun was up and at an hour I’m not usually even awake on days I have to work. While my strike water was heating up, I preheated my mash tun with some water I’d heated on my stove. Once the water reached the calculated strike temperature to reach my target mash temperature, I mashed in. Unfortunately, a quick temperature reading indicated something went awry and that I had undershot my mash temperature by a few degrees. I quickly boiled about a quart of water and added this to the mash to bring the temperature up to 151°F.

After this, I began heating the water for the second mash. I heated this water directly in the kettle I planned to use to hold the mash instead of using my HLT. I figured this would save me the trouble of preheating the kettle and might hold the mash temperature a little better since it was not insulated. Having never done this before, I guess the heat of the kettle itself was more than anticipated, because this time I overshot my mash temperature by several degrees. Not ideal, but this wasn’t part of my normal process so I wasn’t worried about the consistency part, though I will certainly keep this in mind if I try this method again. (I should note here that besides the temperature, the mashes were otherwise the same. Though the mash was split, the grain bill was split equally between the two so that each mash had the same proportion of malts.)

At the end of the hour, I gathered the first runnings of Mash 1, sparged, and gathered the second runnings of Mash 1; all of this wort went into the kettle for the barleywine. I then batch sparged again and gathered the third runnings into another vessel to use for the ESB later. Then, I rapidfire dumped my grains and moved Mash 2 into the tun. I gave the grains some time to settle while I did something else and then gathered the first runnings. I added this wort to the kettle for the barleywine.

At this point, the rest of Mash 2 was intended for the ESB; since I decided to brew the second beer outside of the constraints of the Limitations series, I capped the mash with 1 pound of Crystal 60, sparged twice (allowing the first sparge to sit for at least 15 minutes to ensure I got the most out of the C60), and gathered the second and third runnings for use in the ESB.

While the barelywine wort was coming up to a boil, I realized that I’d gathered half a gallon more than I had intended. Taking that and the preboil gravity into account, I decided to extend the boil by 15 minutes to get closer to my target post-boil volume and gravity. The preboil gravity sample I took also indicated that if I hit my target volume, I would still be a little shy of the 1.100 OG I was going for.

I also realized at this point that the small amount of extra hops in my freezer was Magnum and not Nugget like I’d thought. I had intended on adding that amount to the full ounce I had purchased for my 60 minute hop addition, but that wasn’t going to happen now with the ingredient limitations for this recipe. The missing 0.25 oz. of hops along with the slightly lower gravity prompted me to do some quick calculations for expected IBUs. Playing around with the timing some, I realized that I needed to move one addition earlier in the boil to achieve my target 90 IBUs.

After this point, everything went smoothly. I added hops at the newly calculated times noted in the recipe above and chilled the wort as best as I could with my warm groundwater. Once I transferred the wort to my carboy, I stole half a gallon of wort for a vitality starter; even with the number of starters I had made in preparation for this beer, I wanted to give every fighting chance to this yeast since I had never brewed a beer this big before.

Once the wort had finished chilling to fermentation temperature several hours later, I shook the carboy to aerate it (I don’t have a pure O2 setup like what I generally see recommended for big beers and honestly don’t have the inclination to buy one), and pitched the krausening vitality starter. An hour or two after pitching, I came back to check on things and noticed a marked stratification of the wort and the yeast/starter (I assume due to the density of the wort).

Within 4 days, I noticed the krausen beginning to drop, so I raised the temperature to encourage the yeast to finish up. Once the yeast were finished doing their thing, I cold crashed and kegged the beer.

(As a side note, the “ESB” ended up probably closer to an ordinary bitter instead of a strong bitter in terms of gravity, landing at 1.039. I used two ounces of East Kent Goldings in the boil to reach ~30 IBUs, fermented with S-04, and added one ounce of East Kent Goldings as a dry hop.)

Tasting

This beer poured with a large, white head that had good retention. The color was a copper/orange/dark gold hue. The beer ended up being mostly clear, but retained a slight haze to it that never fully dropped.

The aroma gave the perception of sweetness. There was a clear alcohol presence—boozy, but not solvent-like or overwhelming (i.e., not a negative aspect of the aroma). There were definite peach, apricot, and orange notes that were fairly prominent. The malt character was one that I can really only describe as a generic maltiness—perhaps a hint of bread crust if I had to pin anything defined to it.

The flavor was full of ripe peach and orange. There was a light breadiness, but the prominent flavors were fruit and sweetness. It was simultaneously sweet from the alcohol present and somewhat deceptive on the perceived alcohol content—not quite easy-drinking since there was a quality of heaviness and fullness in the mouthfeel from the sweetness, but there was no heat from the alcohol and so didn’t feel heavy because of the booziness. In this case the booziness and the sweetness are both from alcohol content, but I didn’t really perceive it that way by taste alone. I guess what I’m getting at is that I think the only reason I could tell that the sweetness was from the alcohol was because I knew the ABV; if I went to this beer blind, I wouldn’t think it was 10.3%–just that it was on the sweeter end of things.

If I were to brew this beer again with the same set of limitations, I would change nothing except the hop additions. I certainly went for a large IBU contribution, but somehow it still wasn’t quite enough for my taste. The flavor of the hops was spot on, but I would have liked a little more bitterness to balance out how sweet this beer turned out. One thing I didn’t account for in my recipe was the sweetness that alcohol contributes as well as the lower hop utilization in high gravity worts. Likely, both of those things contributed to the slightly unbalanced sweetness.

If I were to brew this beer again with no limitations, I would definitely change what I already mentioned about the bitterness, but I would also probably drop the wheat from the grain bill since I didn’t think it contributed that much at the percentages I used it. I would also lower the Munich addition and perhaps replace it with a crystal malt for a more traditional barleywine grist.

Beer 1 Beer 2 Beer 3 Beer 4 Beer 5 Style Hoppy Wheat Pale Ale/Lager IPL NEIPA/IPA Munich Lager Maris Otter 34.4% 50% 50% 82% 30% Light Munich 5.5% 25% 41% 7% 60% Wheat 60.1% 25% 9% 11% 10% Hop Addition 1 28.7 IBUs Nugget (60 min.) 41.3 IBUs Nugget (First Wort) 21 IBUs Nugget (30 min.) 41.8 IBUs Nugget (First Wort) 24.4 IBUs Nugget (60 min.) Hop Addition 2 5.5 IBUs Amarillo (5 min.) 5.8 IBUs Amarillo (15 min.) 23 IBUs Amarillo—30 min. Whirlpool 4.8 IBUs Amarillo (20 min Whirpool at 170F) 8.9 IBUs Nugget (10 min.) Hop Addition 3 7.1 IBUs Nugget (5 min.) 2.3 IBUs Nugget (5 min.) N/A 0.8 IBUs Amarillo & Nugget (20 min Whirlpool at 120F) 6.8 IBUs Amarillo (5 min.) Hop Addition 4 16.8 IBUs Amarillo—30 min. Whirlpool 0 IBUs Amarillo (flameout) N/A N/A N/A Hop Addition 5 22 IBUs Nugget—30 min. Whirlpool N/A N/A N/A N/A Dry Hop 2.5 oz. Amarillo, 2 oz. Nugget (10 days) N/A 2 oz. Amarillo @ Day 1; 2 oz. Amarillo @ Day 4 1 oz. Amarillo & 0.5 oz. Nugget @ Day 2, 1 oz. Amarillo @ Day 8; 2 oz. Amarillo & 0.5 oz. @ Day 8 N/A Yeast WLP090 at 64°F, raised to 70°F WLP090 at 66°F, raised to 72°F; WLP810 at 63°F WLP810 at 65°F, raised to 68°F WLP090 WLP810 at 60°F, raised to 65°F OG 1.059 1.058 1.050 1.063 1.055 FG 1.012 1.009/1.014 1.010 1.012 1.013 ABV 6.2% 6.5%/5.8% 5.3% 6.7% 5.5%

Beer 6 Beer 7 Beer 8 Beer 9 Beer 10 Style California Common Hoppy Wheat American Pale Ale ESB Sticke Altbier Maris Otter 30% 21% 50% 80% + 10% baked 9.3% Light Munich 60% 12% 41% 5% 72.1% Wheat 10% 67% 9% 5% 18.6% Hop Addition 1 28.2 IBUs Nugget (30 min.) 23 IBUs Nugget (45 min.) 21 IBUs Nugget (30 min.) 24.4 IBUs Nugget (60 min.) 16.8 IBUs Nugget (60 mi.) Hop Addition 2 4.35 IBUs Amarillo (5 min.) 8.2 IBUs Nugget (15 min.) 23 IBUs Amarillo (0 min.) 6.1 IBUs Nugget (15 min.) 15.8 IBUs Nugget (45 min.) Hop Addition 3 1 oz. Amarillo (165ºF Whirlpool for 20 min.) N/A N/A 2.4 IBUs Nugget (5 min.) 14.2 IBUs Amarillo (15 min.) Hop Addition 4 N/A N/A N/A N/A 5.7 IBUs Amarillo (5 min.) Hop Addition 5 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A Dry Hop 2 oz. Amarillo 1 oz. Amarillo for 9 days; 1 oz. Amarillo for 4 days 1 oz. Amarillo & 1 oz. Nugget day 1 of fermentation; 2 oz. Amarillo day 4 of fermentation 1 oz. Amarillo N/A Yeast WLP810 at 65°F WLP090 at 65°F for 5 days; raised to 72°F over 5 days WLP090 WLP810 at 65°F for 4 days; raised to 70°F over 4 days Wyeast 2112 (WLP810 equivalent) at 60°F; raised to 67°F over 7 days OG 1.050 1.059 1.055 1.057 1.055 FG 1.012 1.009 1.010 1.014 1.014 ABV 5% 6.6% 5.9% 5.6% 5.4%

Beer 11 Beer 12 Beer 13 Beer 14 Style Festbier Hoppy Wheat American Wheat Barleywine Maris Otter 64% 23% 46% 75% Light Munich 18% 18% 8% 16% Wheat 18% 59% 46% 9% Hop Addition 1 23 IBUs Nugget (60 min.) 13.1 IBUs Nugget (30 min.) 21 IBUs Nugget (30 min.) 36.6 IBUs Nugget (60 min.) Hop Addition 2 10.4 IBUs Amarillo (30 min.) 19.6 IBUs Amarillo (Whirlpool) 7 IBUs Amarillo (5 min.) 28.1 IBUs Nugget; 17.3 IBUs Amarillo (30 min.) Hop Addition 3 N/A N/A 23 IBUs Amarillo (Whirlpool) 8.2 IBUs Amarillo (10 min.) Hop Addition 4 N/A N/A N/A N/A Hop Addition 5 N/A N/A N/A N/A Dry Hop N/A 2 oz. Amarillo for 6 days; 2 oz. Amarillo for 1 day N/A N/A Yeast WLP810 at 58°F, raised to 70°F WLP090 at 65°F, raised to 68°F WLP090 & WLP810 at 68°F, raised to 70°F WLP090 at 65°F, raised to 70°F OG 1.052 1.049 1.050 1.092 FG 1.008 1.012 1.010 1.020 ABV 5.8% 4.8% 5.3% 10.3%