estricklin
Well-Known Member
works for me...
Well there are a few problems. It would take about 50 lbs of grain to get us to a pretty high ABV barley wine, too heavy to lift easily, not to mention the water to grain ratio would be rather low, we'd likely get very poor efficiency. Using an actual mash tun would help, doing a sparge could help some too, but that means adding more water and increasing the boil time more.
Here's an idea, and it turns out this is what a lot of people do:
20 lbs Pale Ale Malt
6 lbs 6 Row
5 lbs Oats
5 lbs DME
4 lbs Cane Sugar
This would come out to about 14% ABV as a best case scenario, but 12-13 is more likely.
The sugar not only helps keep the cost down and get the ABV up easily, but it helps to keep the beer from being overly sweet, which is the problem I've always found with barley wines. The oats are just a suggestion, I don't have any idea what to use for specialty grains.
We could use "W" hops, a lot of these barley wines have pretty high IBUs, 50-100 is not uncommon.
What do you think?