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Best Man Barleywine

Based on Lord Big Barleywine Note: Yields 10 gallons!

Original Gravity : 25 Degrees Plato
Final Gravity Pre-Barrel : 13 Degrees Plato

Fermentables:

  • 2-Row malt (50 lbs)
  • Munich malt (16 lbs)
  • Crystal 60L (2 lb)
  • Chocolate (2 lb)

Hops:

  • Columbus Hops (32 oz! Boil 60 minutes)
  • Mt. Hood Hops (4 oz Boil 5 minutes)

Yeast:

  • Belgian Strong Ale Yeast (Wyeast 1388) First Pitch
  • London Ale Yeast (Wyeast 1028) Pitched @ 1 week into fermentation
  • British Ale Yeast (Wyeast 1098) Pitched @ 1 week into fermentation
  • Eau Deu Vie (Wyeast 4347) Pitched @ 2 weeks into fermentation

Notes:

  • Makes 10 gallons and used to make 10 gallons of parti-gyle
  • Barreled at 3 weeks in freshly used Bourbon Barrel

Determining Ethanol Content By Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy

Provided by Dr. Charles Fry PhD and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Chemistry.

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What we got last night was ~4% by molecule. That's a weird measure of alcohol. Paul McGuire suggested the acronym % ABM: percent alcohol by molecule. :)

OK. There are two corrections to be made. The big one I missed -- my only excuse was that it was too late and I was in a hurry; sorry guys!! -- is the molecular weight of the components. H2O is 18 grams/mol, CH3CH2OH is 46 grams/mol.

So let's take the spectrum below. The methyl peak -CH3 is the cleanest for measuring the ethanol content, and is 6% the size of the H2O peak. Two protons on water, three on the -CH3, so we take 6.06% * 2/3 = 4.04%. This is a measure of number of molecules: for every 100 water molecules there are 4.04 ethanol molecules. And I'm still not quite there. The -OH in ethanol is almost certainly sitting on the water peak. So we actually have only 96 H2O for each 4.04 ethanol molecules.

But we have to correct each measure by the molecular weight:

H2O: 96 molecules * 18 grams/mol = 1728 grams relative to ethanol: 4.04 molecules * 46 grams/mol = 185.8 grams

So the weight percent = 185.8 / (1728+185.8) = 9.7% by weight

2nd correction is to correct for specific gravity: 9.7% * 1 / 0.78 = 12.4% by vol alcohol for barleywine

The prebarrel gave 5.68% initially, and that ends up with 11.7% by vol ethanol.