Having got on so well with Henry of Cat Asylum Brewing earlier this year, we decided to return to brew another historic beer together. This time a barley wine!
We wanted to have a go at a modernised version of Bass’ original No.1 barley wine recipe, however we were unable to get ahold of it, instead we did a brew inspired by Truman’s No.1 Barley Wine (1916), originally an all grain 8.5% brew.
Grain Bill
The original grist was as follows:
- Pale malt 14.50 lb 64.44%
- High dried malt 5.25 lb 23.33%
- Flaked maize 2.75 lb 12.22%
As we weren’t entirely sure precisely what ‘High dried malt’ referred to, after some research we decided to replace it with several smaller portions of lighter roast malts to contribute malty complexity. Our adjusted grist was thus as follows:
- Pale Malt - 62.3%
- Flaked Maize 11.3%
- No. 3 Invert 8.3%
- Carapils 8.3%
- Light Crystal 5.3%
- Munich 4.5%
The original recipe had a longer mash so we aimed to mashed for 90 mins. Though I believe in practice it was slightly longer than this.
Mash Temp: 66 Celsius
Liquor to Grist: 2.5 : 1 (Approx.)
Boil
We boiled for 150 mins to get a darker colour from the lighter malt. We used the original hops additions, however I misplaced my note of the weights unfortunately.
- 120 mins - Cluster
- 120 mins - Fuggles
- 60 mins - Fuggles
- 30 mins - Goldings
Post-Boil
We pitched 500g each of Lallemand Nottingham Ale Yeast and Mangrove Jack’s Empire Ale yeast.
OG - 1.087 - Lower than we’d like, potentially the result of a sparge water miscalculation. This will likely put our final ABV around 8.5-9%, ironically appropriate for the strength of the original recipe however ~1% weaker than we were hoping for.
Post-Fermentation
The plan is hopefully to age some, ideally most, of this in wooden casks for 6-12 months.
Historic Barley Wine by Edinburgh Brewing Cooperative is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
