Barleywine #3: Transfer to Secondary

We finally got around to transferring our Number 3 barleywine that we brewed a few weeks ago. It had exploded despite our addition of a blowoff tube, so we really braced ourselves when tasting it. Surprisingly, it tasted GOOD! And right now it's sitting at about 8.5%, which is lower than we tried for with the recipe, but we chalk that up to adding 5lbs of malt that was probably too old. After accounting for those 5lbs, we pretty much hit our mark dead on.

You can see above how much trub ended up all over the primary fermenter. I don't think I've ever seen so much of it on the underside of the lid before.

Can't wait to be drinking this in the winter months!

The Perils of Homebrewing

WHOA! So, if you happened to be following my tweets the other night, you already know that we brewed our first all-grain barleywine. This has accidentally ended up as our brewing-anniversary beer, as we brewed an excellent barleywine last September for our one year anniversary. So this time around, we've grown up and are using all grain rather than malt extract. Of course, when you use 23lb of grain for a 5 to 6 gallon batch, your fermenter is going to end up PRETTY FULL by the end of the night. We figured that a blow-off tube would be necessary, but apparently that wasn't enough. The lid was actually blown off the top of the bucket, so who knows what kind of nasties may have gotten into the beer and how this is going to end up tasting. Oh well.

In the meantime, we had done a second runnings which involves sparging a second time to try to make use of the huge amount of grains. Of course, we didn't have enough space on the stove to boil both, so we figured we'd cover the second-running-wort and boil it the next day. AMATEUR MISTAKE! It was mold city by the morning. Lesson learned.