We're proud to announce our second collaboration with the fine folks at Naked City Brewery up in the Greenwood neighborhood of Seattle. Our first collaboration, Opacity, a Russian Imperial Stout aged in Woodinville Whiskey Barrels was an incredible success. You may be able to find the last traces of Opacity at Brouwer's BigWood 2012 event if you get lucky! For this second collaboration, we're going to again push the limits of the Naked City system and brew an enormous Barleywine that will then be aged in the same whiskey barrels that held Opacity. The recipe for this monster is inspired by a couple of our favorite commercial barrel aged barleywines: We researched both beers and, while there aren't definitive recipes published, Goose Island publishes the King Henry grain bill composition and some specs:
Armed with our information, we created a recipe that was weighted toward the King Henry grain bill but with a dose of Munich malt from MoaS. We also killed the Dark Chocolate malt and instead used Extra Dark crystal to pick up some color without adding too much roast since the Crystal Wheat has enough toasted-roast notes to compete with the sweetness of such a big beer. Here is our recipe:
Process
Brew Day notes The brew day started bright and early at 7am. We brewed a double batch since with the extreme boil down to reach our desired gravity, the Naked City system would net out about 2.5BBL each time. Mash in went well and we hit 149F for the first batch and 148F for the second. Everything went smoothly, but the time it took to boil down each bath was way more than any of us expected. We ended up boiling for 4.5 hours in each batch to concentrate from a 1.090 starting boil gravity to 1.120 where we cut off the boil. The day went pretty long and finally ended at 11pm for a grand total of 16hrs of brewing! Huge thanks again to Don Webb and the whole Naked City crew for having us. Post Fermentation update The beer had a vigorous fermentation at 65F for about 10 days and ended up with a final gravity of 1.026 |