Scott Ickes
Grandmaster Brewer
I thought I'd share these two recipes. My homebrew club has decided to do a blended barrel aged RIS and Concord Belgian Strong Ale. We started off by having a bunch of meet at my home for a candidate beers tasting. It started with 6 of us bringing our heavier dark beers (mostly Russian Imperial Stouts). Our goal was to taste all of the candidate beers separately and then choose the ones we liked the best. Then we would blend them together in different combinations. We originally had hoped to come up with about 4 recipes, making 10 to 20 gallons of each and then aging them in the bourbon barrel after primary was finished.
One of our club members has been nicknamed the mad chemist. He likes to use wild yeast, bacteria, etc. for fermentation. When he makes an outstanding batch of something, he harvests the yeast and keeps it going so that he always has lots of it on hand. He's gotten to be quite good at keeping wild yeasts strains going.
We discovered that his Concord Belgian Strong Ale, made with wild yeast on the concord grapes made every other beer it was blended with better! We had 6 RIS (or similar) recipes that we really liked. We combined all of those recipes into one large composite recipe and then labored over that RIS recipe until we could simplify it. We then did a test batch of the simplified RIS recipe and it's quite good.
We're now going to brew up 30 to 35 gallons of it between about 5 or 6 of us. The differences in our efficiencies will make each persons contribution unique. We'll also brew of 30 to 35 gallons of our "mad chemists" Concord Belgian Strong Ale.
Once they are all finished with the primary, we're going to be blending the two beers into a 59 gallon Port Wine barrell (we had intended to use a bourbon barrell, but a one time used Port barrell fell into our lap for $35!
We'll age it in the barrell for at least a year, maybe two years, until the taste is just like we want it. We may or may not add Bret to it. We're thinking we'll get some funk from the barrell without adding the bret, but it is an option to add it. We'll have about 10 gallons extra for topping off to replace the angels share.
I'm attaching the three recipes, which are the Concord Belgian Strong Ale, the composite RIS and then the simplified RIS, where we drastically reduced the grain bill and hops schedules. The RIS recipe is still quite complex, but not as unwieldly as the original composite recipe.
Any thoughts you might have or shared barrel aged beer projects, etc. would be appreciated.
One of our club members has been nicknamed the mad chemist. He likes to use wild yeast, bacteria, etc. for fermentation. When he makes an outstanding batch of something, he harvests the yeast and keeps it going so that he always has lots of it on hand. He's gotten to be quite good at keeping wild yeasts strains going.
We discovered that his Concord Belgian Strong Ale, made with wild yeast on the concord grapes made every other beer it was blended with better! We had 6 RIS (or similar) recipes that we really liked. We combined all of those recipes into one large composite recipe and then labored over that RIS recipe until we could simplify it. We then did a test batch of the simplified RIS recipe and it's quite good.
We're now going to brew up 30 to 35 gallons of it between about 5 or 6 of us. The differences in our efficiencies will make each persons contribution unique. We'll also brew of 30 to 35 gallons of our "mad chemists" Concord Belgian Strong Ale.
Once they are all finished with the primary, we're going to be blending the two beers into a 59 gallon Port Wine barrell (we had intended to use a bourbon barrell, but a one time used Port barrell fell into our lap for $35!
We'll age it in the barrell for at least a year, maybe two years, until the taste is just like we want it. We may or may not add Bret to it. We're thinking we'll get some funk from the barrell without adding the bret, but it is an option to add it. We'll have about 10 gallons extra for topping off to replace the angels share.
I'm attaching the three recipes, which are the Concord Belgian Strong Ale, the composite RIS and then the simplified RIS, where we drastically reduced the grain bill and hops schedules. The RIS recipe is still quite complex, but not as unwieldly as the original composite recipe.
Any thoughts you might have or shared barrel aged beer projects, etc. would be appreciated.
