Barley Wine

[BeerSmith]

Something to watch out for...

I had one user (some time ago) who had serious problems making his first Barley Wine so I thought I would post this as a warning to others...

You will NOT get the same efficiency for a batch of barley wine as you do on a normal brew.  Barley wine has roughly 2-3 times the amount of grain that a normal brew would have, but roughly the same amount of mash and sparge water (combined).

The net effect is a loss of 10-15% overall brewing efficiency (i.e. if you normally have 75% efficiency your Barley Wine efficiency might be as low as 60%!).

The net effect - PLEASE lower your brewhouse efficiency by 10-15% from the normal value if you want to hit the correct target gravity.

Another quick tip - if you take second runnings (i.e. after you finished sparging your barley wine) from the spent grains you will still have strong enough wort to make a nice 1.035 (or so) gravity regular beer.  To do this is called "Party Gyle" brewing - making more than one beer of differing strength from the same grains.

Cheers!
Brad

[cj_in_j]

I recently brewed a major Imperial IPA and also noticed some loss of efficiency. Luckily I was warned about it in advance, so I lowered by estimated efficiency from 80% to 70% -- and I hit my target within 0.001 points! Some things that also help, lautering very slowly (I think mine took 2 hours), starting out with more wort and boiling longer (I did a 2-hour boil starting with 8.5 gallons instead of an 80-minute boil starting with 7.5 gallons), and occasionally raking the grain bed about halfway down. It's a lot of extra work, but it should be worth it.