|BACKGROUND|

To truly understand this beer, first one must understand what boilo is.

If rich white people in suburbia like to mull wine for the holidays, then poor coal miners from the Schuylkill region of Pennsylvania like to mull shitty hard liquor. That’s boilo.

As such, many families have their own secret recipe for their seasonal delights. Ultimately, there are some common ingredients, like the spice list and 100 proof whiskey, but outside of that, there’s a lot of wiggle room for interpretation, whether it uses cider, water, or 7-Up, which whiskey, which spices, etc.

So, to kick everything off, here’s my recipe for boilo, which is an amalagamation of about 3 recipes I’ve been fortunate enough to be shared with me from various sources:

Boilo

2# Honey

1 gal Apple Cider

2 Oranges, halved and juiced

2 Lemons, halved and juiced

1 cup Raisins

2 Bay Leaves

2 sticks Cinnamon

8 Cloves

10 Allspice Berries

1 Tbsp Ginger, diced and dried

1 Tbsp Carroway Seeds

1 Tbsp Peppercorns

1 pinch Nutmeg

1 pinch Saffron Threads

And the crucial ingredient (which there could potentially be fistfights over the brand of choice):

Two (2) 750 mL or One (1) 1.5 L bottle of 4 Queens 100 Proof Whiskey (or any 100+ whiskey, or grain alcohol like Everclear)

Now, a lot of this is up for debate, such as that my iteration would technically fall into the catergory of “apple pie” boilo, because I use cider as my base in lieu of water or ginger ale. 4 Queens whiskey is also considered “traditional” for boilo as it’s made in close locale to the region (from Northern Jerz), but again, sleeves can get rolled up real fast depending on who you talk to.

All in all, actually making boilo is stupid easy, and it can be done on the stove in a large stock pot or can also be done in a crock pot. Pretty much, you put all of the ingredients on that first list into your cooking vessel (including the orange and lemon rinds), and bring it to a simmer for ~30 min, which could be slightly closer to 3-4 hours if you’re going the crock pot method. After that, allow the mixture cool, strain out the spices and fruit with cheese cloth or whatever, blend it with the whiskey, and then jar it up for later days. Truly, it’s that simple.

From my basic math, it’s about 25% alcohol, which gives it a light burn, but the “nectar of the coal region” certainly does what it sets out to do – warms you from the inside out.

This sized batch will yield about 6 quart mason jars’ worth, or roughly a gallon and a half of boilo.

As one of my favorite seasonal treats, I decided that it would only be appropriate if I could do the drink justice while somehow turning it into a beer. I also had about one more use left in my whiskey barrel, so I figured that there wasn’t anything left to lose.

Them Digits

Batch Size: 5 gallons

Mash Temp: 154F for 60 min.

Boil Time: 90 min.

Batch Efficiency: 59% (Not sure how much the cider threw this off?)

Original Gravity: 1.104 // 24.6 P

Final Gravity: 1.030 // 7.6 P

Estimated ABV: 11.2% (+ .2% from priming boilo)

IBUs: 39

Color: 7.9 EBC // 15.7 SRM

Recipe

Malts

6# Pearl | 54.5%

5# Honey (Clover) | 23%

2# Malted Oats | 9%

1# Malted Spelt |4.5%

1# Malted Rye| 4.5%

1# Dark Munich | 4.5%

Hops

.5 oz. Nugget @ 90 min.

1 oz. Palisade @ 25 min.

1 oz. Palisade @ 5 min.

Yeast

2x Wyeast 1318 (London III)

Spices and Stuff

1 tablet Whirlfloc @ 15 min

1 tsp Yeast Nutrient

1 gal Apple Cider

All the previously mentioned boilo spices

|BREW LOG|

While certainly not the ass crack of dawn, I woke up early on the morning of Thanksgiving day – yes, it’s the final beer of that marathon – to start brewing. The grains were already weighed out an milled, so all that remained was to establish a mise en place and start going.

While the mash water was heating up to strike temp, I measured out my spices and cut up the citrus fruit. It’s worth noting that I actually fucked up slightly on this part, which will be addressed later.

I managed to hit the mash temp pretty on the nose, where I was shooting for a 154F, but taking 153.5F, allowing the beer to rest for an hour. Even at checking the mash pH ~15 minutes in, it was slightly high, but ultimately still in the acceptable range of 5.2 – 5.6

As one of the two batches that I was deciding to expidite/test batch sparging vs. my poorly executed fly sparge, I collected about 3 gallons of first runnings and then sparged, with a little stirring and a 10 minute rest, before collecting second runnings to bring the kettle up to about 5.5 gallons. Now, this sounds low, but that’s because I shaved a gallon of water off my sparge that I was going to return back in as a gallon of cider. It was a bit disheartening, but mathematically sound, that when I added the cider, it lowered the nice, high gravity reading that I had taken, just not a hard as straight water would have.

With about 30 minutes left in the boil, I added in all the honey, the spices, and the fruit, securely tied up in a muslin bag to make extraction and containment much easier.

After that, it was simply just letting the boil ride. I added in the usual tab of whirlfloc, although I didn’t add in any pectic enzyme because I wasn’t particularly worried about clarity in the beer. I also added in a Tbsp of yeast nutrient to help this beer ferment, since it’s a big boy and all.

Cooling the beer down to 70F was a breeze with the weather being on the colder side, and after taking a gravity reading with a refractometer, the beer showed it clocking in a little lower than my initial estimates. However, I had also initially planned to use .5# lactose in this beer as well, so it was going to be lower than I had initially planned for anyways.

I pitched both packets of yeast and allowed the beer to ride out fermentation next to the previous night’s batch and continued onto the final batch of the day, completing the trifecta.

After a few weeks of fermenting, it was time to move the beer into the barrel. Luckily, barrel prep work is pretty easy, depending on how intense you want to be about it. For me, I boil up 5.5 gallons of water and fill the barrel to overflowing and also piss it all over the outside. I store my barrel dry (which is eh… not highly recommended), but I’d recommend that you do it the night before to help the barrel swell. Otherwise, the barrel should be sanitized/sterilized after ~20 minutes of contact with boiling hot water (you’d need a longer time if it was AT LEAST 185F water). I did this probably 5 hours before I was going to rack the beer into the barrel.

At this point, a large majority of the whiskey flavor was already used out of the barrel, but there was still a light hint of it, on top of that sweet oak-y tannic quality as well.

Now, remember how I had said that I fucked up waaaaay back in the spices part of the brewday? Yeah, I made a whole point about that “mise en place” shit, but I forgot to get the carroway seeds out of my backpack and the raisins out of my car. So, those two ingredients didn’t make it into the beer. Until now.

After emptying out the barrel of the hot water, I took about 3/4 cup of RO water and brought it to a boil on the stove was the cup of raisins and Tbsp of carroway seeds, which had a nice little flavor of pumpernickel bread. Then, using a sanitized funnel, I smashed them into the barrel before racking the beer over. Bung went into, barrel went into the basement to sleep for another few weeks.

Fast forward 6 weeks, which included tastings of the barrel at Christmas and after New Year’s, and I decided that the beer was ready to come out of hibernation. Now, the catch was that I not only wanted to make a boilo inspired beer, I wanted a boilo infused beer. So, I did what any semi-professional alcoholic would do and put them together. Racking in and out of the barrel, I lost about a half gallon of wort, landing me with 4.5 gal of actual beer to bottle. It’s also worth noting that I forgot the raisins were in the barrel. I about flipped my shit when a noticeably brown object slid through the siphon hose. And then again and again. I had to sanitize a small strainer to catch one and remember that fact.

I had checked the gravity on the beer when it was going into the barrel, which had it clocking in at 1.030, which was the ballpark I had expected it to hit (1.025 was more the ideal), and it had stayed there during barrel aging, ending up with that being the final gravity.

Since boilo itself is not fermented, it’s pretty much apple cider and honey, both of which are fermentable sugars. But, this required doing a little bit more math, as I’m not particularly keen on glass shrapnel and wasting expensive batches of homebrew. The rough estimates of sugar content in boilo is as follows:

2# of honey = 32 oz. 1 gal of cider = ~30g / cup = 17 oz. / gal 1.5L whiskey = 0g Total yield = 1.5 gal (.4 of which is whiskey) ~50 oz. sugar / batch of boilo 50 oz. / gal = 3.125 oz. / cup

So, using the priming calculator on Northern Brewer, I shot for about 2.2 vol/CO2, which is typically appropriate for a barleywine. I’d need a little over 4 oz. of straight honey to prime, so I called it 1 1/2 cup of boilo to reach 2.2-2.3 range.

I rehydrated half a pack of Safale US-05 in a sanitized glass with RO water and added it to the bottling bucket to help with carbing. I had also made a small tincture with about a 1/2 cup of 4 Queens and the boilo spices, just to be able to dial in the spices if necessary. I maybe added back in an additional 1/2 oz for taste.

From there, it was bottling and labeling, but since it was falling into a later night than expected, I bailed on the waxing that I had planned for this batch. All that was left was to wait for the beer to finish conditioning in the bottle.

Tasting Notes

I’m going to call this a braggot by tradional style guidelines, unless you really want to get technical and argue with me that “buh-buh-buh a braggot is at least(!) 30% honey and this beer isn’t!”

I don’t care. I also appreciated the joke of referencing a boilermaker, which is a shot of whiskey dropped into a beer. It’s not entirely too far off either, since I blended the real boilo into the batch as well.

If anything, I’m actually a little too proud of myself for coming up with what I’ve more officially been calling it – a boilowine – as well as the name.

Initially racking out the of the barrel, the beer was completely clear, with time having allowed a majority of the sediments to settle out. Given time, I’m sure that will happen again, but as of now, there’s a mild murkiness/opaqueness to the beer, lending it a more khaki/tan hue than the amber/golden color that it can display. It’s got a cream colored head that dissipates slightly fast, but laces somewhat down the side of the glass. The nose is light stone fruit with a little bit of earthiness mixed with Big Red gum and peppercorns.

Either way, this beer is deceptively good. For being so high octane, it’s pretty damn smooth. Dangerously so. With a higher finishing gravity, the beer has a slight sweetness to it, which is not overly cloying, but also has the similar quality to what the origin – the boilo – inherently has itself. The residual sugars double down with the malted oats and spelt to help provide a supple and full-bodied mouthfeel. Decidedly short from the Castrol-esque RIS stouts that I like, but definitely indicative of boilo as well.

The flavor is where the beer truly does shine. It tastes like boilo. I mean, it should. I essentially made a weird version of boilo, with extra boilo spices and real boilo. I’d really have had to fuck something up on that front. The spices are well balanced and, knowing what I’m looking for, I get the flavors of everything in balance. Even then, the spices don’t completely overwhelm the base beer, with the English malts and honey popping their head in for a quick Pip-pip-cheerio and the light hint of stonefruit from the yeast and the hops.

Overall, I’m pretty pleased with how this one turned out. It’s definitely a bit off-kilter as to a particular style (it’s not a winter warmer guyz), but aside from having to continually explain what boilo is to people, it’s a pretty good low(er) ABV alternative to the real deal. And it’s also gotten the seal of approval from my Pottsville friend and his brethren, which is ultimately the most important part for me.

Luckily, the weather is taking a turn back to the colder side here, otherwise I might be a little more hesitant to try and drink down a very clearly winter worthy beverage. As the Lithuanians would say, Į sveikatą!