German Style IPA

Bottled this up over the weekend.  The dry hop was in there a little longer than I wanted as I just was too busy to bottle on schedule.  Sample tasted pretty good.  I got a lot of the hoppy pils flavor but also got a bit of fruitiness from the Kolsch yeast.  FG was 1.012 yielding 7.5% ABV.

Was contemplating brewing this weekend myself. A Barleywine as a matter of fact. Totally different approach than yours tho.

Did not get to it, but should be able to this coming weekend.  Gonna take the SMaSH to another level.

Maris Otter / Challenger SMaSH (11 quarts)

10 lbs Maris Otter

1 oz Challenger (6.5% AA) 60 minutes

Wyeast 1028 London Ale (1 qt starter)

Mash 151 for 90 minutes.  Draw 2 quartts of the first runnings and boil them down separately to about a pint (add back to main boil with 10 minutes left).  Boil remaining wort for 2 hours.  Chill and pitch yeast.  Bottle in 4 - 5 weeks.

For the mash and sparge I am going to use the cooler instead of the pot and the bag.  Larger grain bills are harder to drain and manage and I am thinking that this will make it easier.

This is about as simple of a barleywine recipe as it gets.  Curious as to what the color will be with the extended boiling.

Just took a small sample of bitter monkey out of the fermenter and then chilled it, gave it to my wife and asked her to sniff and tell me what she thought it was (pretending for a moment I did not know what it was I found in the fridge). She said, maybe guava juice? Or mango? Or grapefruit.

 

I'd drink that.

Airlocks are bubbling vigorously this morning. That's a big relief. Early and active activity bodes well for good efficiency with this sludge.

Well cripes. The ferment was very active, then stopped @ 1.130, which is ~7% ABV so far. The yeast is rated to 20-25%. Have aerated like nuts. Gonna get some yeast nutrient today and add it.

Worst case, I will clean it up with Brett.

Took two days to get it all done. Ended up with ~8 gallons of this. SG 1.185. Here 2 hours later, after pitching a massive volume of yeast, I already have airlock activity.

 

I consulted with several professional brewers. Different from the initial information I had, they suggested that when brewing a massive beer such as this that you start with a lower ABV and then continuously feed it with more sugar, nutrients and oxygen to get the SG/ABV up, always keeping it at 1.080 until near goal. But none of that helps me now. There was also some concern that I under pitched, but I pitched with a HUGE load of yeast. Looking back at the whole thing, I actually think that the huge SG and the heat the initial ferment caused killed off the yeast. Of course none of that helps me finish this ferment.

So -

- Yesterday I set up a bunch of 1L starters, each with a different yeast, using dark DME @ 1.060. One of them had kicked in and fermented down to 1.020 this morning, so I pitched that with loads of aeration and nutrients. Now at work, wondering what is going on. This one, interestingly, was a safalie powdered yeast packet. Next one to go in will likely be the White Yeast 001, California Ale yeast, which also has shown good activity. The plan is to keep pitching yeast for a bit and see what happens.

I have two backup plans right now:

1. Dilute the wort back down to a more friendly SG and ferment, then freeze concentrate it all back up

2. Use Brett to finish the ferment

Right. This is the issue. Rather than starting with a super high SG wort as I did, you start with a basic barleywine and feed it syrup or candi sugars (or maple syrup, or molasses, etc).

I suspect that you can also add the wort like I made a bit at a time so as not to overwhelm the ferment, which would increase volume with the high SG wort.

I like this idea better than your prior post as I would think that the flavor of the final product would be better.

Hindsight, but I wonder if you could do something like put the buckets in a water bath to dissipate the heat.  Could swap out frozen water bottles as needed.  Agree with the theory that it could have got too hot.