Brew Day: Thomas Brady's Ale (2019)

It's been two years since I brewed the first batch of Thomas Brady's Ale. Originally I had intended to brew the beer on an annual basis. Unfortunately last year I was busy settling into a new house and new job, and just never got around to it.

The idea for the beer came from my friend Eamon. Every New Years Day he brews his barleywine, ages it over the course of the year, bottles it in the fall, and opens the first bottle on New Years Eve. I brewed my batch a few days after New Years.

Brewing on a stove-top, I made my first barleywine with an obscene amount of malt extract. Now that I have both a yard to brew in where I can use my propane burner, and my Mash & Boil that is capable of a full volume boil. That makes brewing an all-grain barleywine with a grist of over 20 pounds of grain far more practical. The bones of this all-grain recipe are very similar to the original extract version.

The last label from my last sack of
Propino Pale Malt.

For the last several years at Muntons our main spring barley variety has been Propino. Before I worked for the company, the North Shore Brewers had our SMaSH base malt project where members brewed beers with different base malts as a way to evaluate them. In hindsight it was fortuitous that for my SMaSH blonde the "UK 2-row" I used was Propino. Out of all the SMaSH beers brewed, I liked the one I brewed with Propino the best.

New barley varieties are developed every few years as growers seek greater yields in the field and disease resistance. In East Anglia, where Muntons sources most of its barley, Propino is on its way out and Planet is on it's way in. My craft beer customers have all switched over to Planet, as I was down to about 14 pounds of Propino. Using the last of my Propino in a special beer like Thomas Brady's Ale that will be cellared for years felt an appropriate swan song.

When I decided to brew this year's vintage as an all-grain beer, I revisited the recipe Pattinson published on his website:



It is interesting that the grist uses both pale and lager malt. English pale malt is relatively low in diastatic power. My educated guess is that the lager malt was added to help convert the un-malted wheat in the grist. Most American brewers are not familiar with lager malt, and most homebrew shops don't sell it. Lager malt is light in color like Pilsner malt, but usually doesn't have the same honey-like sweetness.

As I slowly work through a sack of wheat malt, I used wheat malt in my recipe. This makes diastatic power not a concern. Considering I didn't have any lager malt this was a good thing. I still didn't have quite enough Propino Pale Malt to replace all of the lager malt in the original recipe. As a substitute I used Muntons Super Pale Malt.

Super Pale is an awesome malt. It is the lightest colored malt Muntons makes; lighter than even its Pilsner and Lager Malts. The bag I have at home is 1.3L in color. Super Pale was designed for hoppy beers, and in this recipe will allow most of the base malt flavor to come from the Propino Pale.

The specialty malt in the 2017 vintage was a caramel rye malt, and I aged the beer on oak cubes soaked in rye whiskey. As I thought of which spirit I would use for this batch the choice that immediately came to mind was a bourbon made by one of my customers. This bourbon uses a small amount of Muntons Crystal 400 which is 150L. Since the malt is in the spirit it was natural to use it in the beer.

Brewer: Jason Chalifour
Batch Size: 5.25 gal	Style: English Barleywine (17D)
Boil Size: 6.85 gal	Style Guide: BJCP 2015
Color: 18.8 SRM	Equipment: Mash & Boil With Cooler
Bitterness: 60.6 IBUs	Boil Time: 105 min
Est OG: 1.103 (24.5° P)	Mash Profile: Single Infusion, Medium Body, No Mash Out
Est FG: 1.024 SG (6.1° P)	Fermentation: Ale, Two Stage
ABV: 10.8%	Taste Rating:

Ingredients

Amount	Name	Type	#
9.61 gal	Amber Full (7-17 SRM)	Water	1
2.06 g	Chalk (Mash 60 min)	Misc	2
1.28 g	Epsom Salt (MgSO4) (Mash 60 min)	Misc	3
1.10 g	Gypsum (Calcium Sulfate) (Mash 60 min)	Misc	4
14 lbs 7.04 oz	Pale Ale, Propino (Muntons) (2.5 SRM)	Grain	5
4 lbs 8.00 oz	Super Pale Malt (Muntons) (1.7 SRM)	Grain	6
2 lbs 8.00 oz	Wheat Malt (Muntons) (2.2 SRM)	Grain	7
1 lbs	Crystal 400 (Muntons) (170.0 SRM)	Grain	8
1.25 oz	Nugget [13.0%] - Boil 75 min	Hops	9
1.00 oz	Aurora [8.2%] - Boil 30 min	Hops	10
0.24 tsp	Irish Moss (Boil 10 min)	Misc	11
2 pkgs	Nottingham Yeast (Lallemand #-)	Yeast	12
0 pkgs	Super High Gravity Ale (White Labs #WLP099)	Yeast	13

This was the second batch in a row where my yield was exceedingly poor. The last batch was a re-brew of Crackerjack Cream Ale I intended to enter into NHC.

My starting gravity going into the fermenter was 1.080, barely enough for the beer to be a barleywine. When my pre-boil gravity was off, I disassembled my mill as I waited for my wort to reach a boil. I found a barley kernel that may have been causing one of the rollers to jam. I cleared that out, gave the mill an overdue brushing, and reset the gap to the factory default position. Hopefully things will be back to normal during my next all-grain batch.

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Checking in: Thomas Brady's Ale (Specialty Wood-Aged Beer)

Thomas Brady's Ale is a barleywine inspired by the original barrel-aged beer Thomas Hardy's Ale. In the five weeks since I brewed the beer, Tom Brady only added to his legacy by leading the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history. If nothing else, my choice in name has been vindicated. .

After brew day I moved the fermenter to the coolest place in my apartment and let my re-pitched 1187 Ringwood Ale yeast go to town. After ten days activity in the airlock slowed down, and I moved the fermenter to a warmer spot to give the yeast a little nudge to keep going and gobble up any diacetyl. Wyeast recommends a diacetyl rest when using Ringwood. 

Four days later I pitched a vile of WLP099 Super High Gravity yeast. When I pitched the vial my fermenter was at 68F. There was also still some krausen on top, but it had greatly receded. Within 12 hours the airlock was bubbling away again as the temperature crept up to 72F. The temperature eventually dropped back down to 68F. From the time I pitched my second yeast, I gave the beer three weeks to sit on the yeast cake to make sure the yeast had more than enough time to clean up chemical byproducts from fermentation. 

As this was an extract brew I did not take a starting gravity reading. Firstly it would not have been accurate because my partial boil was not fully dissolved with the top off water. Secondly without actually mashing grain, there is no reason my beer should have been below the 1.113 SG BeerSmith calculated.

Before I racked the beer to a carboy, I took a gravity reading:

Adjusting for temperature the gravity was down to 1.008! That means the alcohol by volume is over 14%!! Wowza!!

On White Labs' website attenuation for Super High Gravity yeast is listed at 80-100%. Somehow I achieved 92% attenuation. 

With my gravity that low my immediate concern would be that the beer would be thin. When I tasted a sample it actually wasn't. It was quite alcoholic, and had enough body that it tasted a bit like lacquer. In a beer this big, that is to be expected.The only cure is time.

I did decide to age the beer on wood. I went back to the notes and BJCP judges' feedback from the last wood-aged beer I made Pyrite Pistol. The judges liked the beer, but wanted more wood and more spirit character. For that batch I used 24 wood cubes soaked in Islay scotch, and aged the beer on the wood for eight weeks. 

This time around I used 30 cubes, 25% more than I used in Pyrite Pistol. Piggybacking on the caramel rye malt in the beer, I soaked the cubes in George Dickel Rye whisky. When I tasted some of the whisky on the rocks I was taken aback by how smooth it was. Compared to bourbon, the rye had more body and sweetness along with a low spice character I'd expect in a rye beer. It was love at first sip. I rye whisky will be a new fixture in my home. 

Right now Thomas Brady's ale is back on the landing. The chips and leftover rye whisky have been blended in. Now the plan is to forget about it for awhile. I am going to give it at least three months to age, and maybe longer. Even if I bottle it in three months, it will need more time to age. Unlike some other batches I have forgotten about, this one could use some alone time. 

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Brew Day: Thomas Brady's Ale (English Barleywine)

Jim Koch likes to talk about how Samuel Adams with first its Triple Bock, and later Utopias pioneered barrel-aging of beer. Goose Island makes similar boasts as it has been brewing Bourbon County since the 1990s. Going back to the beginning of the craft beer boom Bourbon County Brand Stout is probably the most influential barrel-aged beer from the craft beer movement.

Alas before these beers hit the market, before the craft beer boom, the first and most legendary barrel-aged beer was Thomas Hardy's Ale. This English Barleywine was first brewed in 1967 by the Eldridge Pope Brewery on the 40th anniversary of author Thomas Hardy's passing. This big and boozy brew was aged in sherry casks. The bottle told the drinker that the beer would improve with age.

Several years later the beer was brought back. Quite difficult to brew, the recipe was tweaked over time and the brand was passed around by various brewers. Production eventually stopped in 2008 until recently a new group has sought to resurrect the beer. From the beginning the beer was designed to be aged, and over the years vintages of Thomas Hardy's Ale have been commodities on the secondary market.

Beer historian Ron Pattinson has published the original recipe on his blog. This would actually be a great beer for our club's barrel project. Since the club has just brewed a barleywine, I used it as the basis for my own recipe.

Brewing an all-grain batch larger than three gallons with a full boil on my stove-top is a struggle. The only way I could brew a 12% beer in my apartment would be to use malt extract, lots and lots of malt extract. I used a mix of English Maris Otter, Extra Light, and Plain Wheat extracts from Munton's. To boost the alcohol and lighten the final gravity I also added one pound of corn sugar. To put it in perspective this is roughly triple the amount of extract I used in my first-ever batch.

Two pounds DME, one pound corn sugar

My plan was to brew the beer on a snowy night while I bottled Dundalk Irish Heavy. A beer this big will need a lot of yeast. After bottling the Dundalk, I had plenty of yeast I could harvest from the bottom of the fermenter for my barleywine.

While the Ringwood Ale 1187 from the Dundalk will give the beer the English character I am going for, alone it isn't the best choice for a barleywine. It's attenuation is low, and it is only alcohol tolerant up to 10% ABV. Ringwood alone would likely leave an overly malty and heavy finished beer. My manager at the Modern Homebrew Emporium where I have been working on Saturdays Eamon, brews a barleywine every year on New Years Day. With his barleywine, Eamon pitches a second yeast, WLP099 Super High Gravity Ale Yeast when he racks his beer to a secondary vessel. Rumored to be the actual Hardy yeast, it is alcohol tolerant up to 25% with exceedingly high attenuation. This should make sure my beer finishes with the way I want it to.

The other modifications I made to the recipe were driven by frugality and ineptitude. For hops I used Nugget for bittering and Liberty for flavor because I had both in my inventory. A 90-minute boil should drive off most of the American hop flavor from the Nugget. The Hallertau-derived Liberty has more of a continental flavor which shouldn't be too out of place. Pattinson's blog suggests Eldrige Pope used Hallertau and Styrian Goldings.

After tella brewers cleaned the shop out of Crystal 80 and 90 before Orthodox Christmas, I adjusted my specialty malts to be a mix 0.375 pounds each of Caramel 60 and Caramel 120. As I started my brew several hours after carrying my ingredients inside, I couldn't find my bag of crushed specialty malt. I went back out into the snow to check my car, the bag wasn't there. If I dropped it on the ground between my house and my car, the bag was long since burried in snow. I was irate that a small bag missing malt could ruin my brew day.

This bag of Caramel Rye Malt came up huge after I misplaced the specialty malts I planned to use. 

After my meltdown I looked through my stock of ingredients to try and find a specialty malt that would work. I found a one pound bag of Briess Caramel Rye malt that was swag from Homebrew Con. The color contribution should be similar, but I expect the flavor to be different. Anyone who has eaten a rye seed off a slice of rye bread or a bagel has an idea of the flavor rye can impart in a beer. Compared to all the extract, it is a small percentage of the grist. If it gives the beer a unique character then I am all for it. What's the point of homebrewing if you're not willing to try stuff?

After steeping and adding most of my malt extract, the beer has a beautiful amber color. 

36 hours after pitching, krausen is starting to back up through my airlock. I had to use a blow-off tube.

In addition to pitching the new yeast, I plan to add some oak cubes to the beer just as I did with Pyrite Pistol. Based on feedback I received from a competition, I'll add more oak cubes and give the beer more time to age on the oak. Since there is caramel rye malt in the beer, maybe I will soak the cubes in rye whiskey!

See the full recipe here.

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