Brewing Aged Burbon Barrel Iced Barley Wine

kurtford · Post by **kurtford** » Wed May 11, 2011 9:20 am

I just started a 2.5 gallon starter today for this extremely high gravity beer. The homemade stir plate that we all made is doing an awesome job at agitating the starter for me.(Thanks again to Jeremy for setting that up for all of us in the tech meeting)

I used WL099-White Labs Super High Gravity Yeast

I'm shooting for 20% to 30% alcohol beer, It requires me to brew 3 small batches adding one at a time to build it up to it's full potential.

Hopefully all the time and effort for this beer is worth it.

If anyone has any suggestions or tips for me the more the merrier, this is the first time trying to do a beer this extreme.

Matt F · Post by **Matt F** » Wed May 11, 2011 9:40 am

The only suggestion I have is make your 2.5 gallon starters a beer you can drink. That is the size that Randy brews. Sounds like a really fun project. Hope I get to try some.

BrewHound · Post by **BrewHound** » Wed May 11, 2011 10:57 am

Not sure but you will have a lot of problems getting that high. I do think they recently introduced some high grav yeasts that boast up to 20%, but I would think that will be hard to reach unless conditions are ideal.

You might want to consider doing your your plan but then plan on a freeze distallation process at the end to concentrate flavors and alcohol. If doing this you should account for it in the recipe as all the flavors concentrate during that process sense you are removing water.

tompb · Post by **tompb** » Wed May 11, 2011 5:30 pm

I would think you will need to do small wort additions along with oxygen twice a day for the first week at least. That's how Paxton did a Dogfish Head 120 clone.

kurtford · Post by **kurtford** » Wed May 11, 2011 10:44 pm

The WL099 says, by doing small wort additions, oxygenating, big yeast additions, and with all the ideal conditions they have had multiple reports of successfully getting 25% alcohol. The icing, which I'll do this upcoming winter hopefully will get me an additional 5%. I'm using a fermenter as my yeast starter with the stir plate, which I'll also use on the beer itself to help agitate the yeast at the bottom of the fermenter.

I could get some alpha amylase and some glucose from work to help break down the sugar molecules from 3 and 4s down to 1 and 2s to help with fermentation process but I haven't done much research on these for homebrewing purposes.