Beer Style: American Strong Ale
Includes American-style barleywines, wheatwines as well as several barrel-aged beer.
Browniewine
Volume-wise, booze-wise, and holy crap-wise, this still remains our “biggest” collaboration to date (only Sierra Nevada brews more beer per year in terms of our collabs). This one all happened on a whim as Allen Tracy, a member with family in the Paso Robles area, stopped in at the brewery and had a palaver with Brewmaster Matt Brynildson about brewing a special beer. Matt said, “whatever you want to make” and this crazy thing came about from two suggestions “a really big brown ale” and “rum barrels.” The recipe design was created by Steve Cook and then brewed by a large crowd of Falcons. (We say brewed, but really the whole place is computer-controlled so they mostly ran around like barely trained monkeys after eating partially fermented bananas.)
This beer went on to be a surprising hit with the beer ticket crowd who would clamber for a chance to get a taste whenever Firestone rolled it out for things like their Firestone Walker Invitational.
KISS Barleywine
This barleywine gets all of its fermentable sugars from malt extract. It’s easier and much less time-consuming than brewing all-grain barleywine.
Frost Beer Works’ Fall Ale clone
Fall Ale is an American strong ale made with heritage crystal malt, rye, and oats, that tastes like Autumn in New England.
Home Golden Age Ale (1910)
Home Golden Age Ale (1910) (5 gallons/19 L, all grain)OG = 1.082 FG = 1.015IBU = 80 SRM = 5 ABV = 8.8% This is by far the Home Brewing Co.’s biggest
Prairie Artisan Ales’ Okie clone
In a space between a brown ale and a barleywine, Okie packs a punch delivering flavors of sweet caramel and dark toast led by the nuanced character used in the barrel-aging process.
Bell’s Brewery’s Song Of The Open Road clone
Song of the Open Road will pour a nice shade of brown with garnet notes. The hearty ale is best served in a snifter glass and will pair well with rich desserts, a fine cigar or, of course, the literary works of Walt Whitman.
Jamil’s American Barleywine
The balance of bittering versus malt sweetness should always be toward the bitter, but expect the beer to become more and more balanced as the beer ages and the bittering drops out.
American Barleywine: Aged in the USA
American barleywine is rich and strong. It has a big malt flavor and aggressive hopping, but it still has a balance between the malt character and hop character.
Great Lakes Brewing Co.’s Christmas Ale clone
Great Lakes Brewing Co.’s Christmas Ale clone (5 gallons/19 L, all-grain)OG = 1.070 FG = 1.012IBU = 30 SRM = 19 ABV = 7.5% By Cleveland tradition, the annual release of Christmas Ale
Two Roads Brewing Company’s Route of All Evil clone
(5 gallons/19 L, all-grain) OG = 1.072 FG = 1.012 IBU = 30 SRM = 37 ABV = 7.9% Ingredients11 lbs. (5 kg) 2-row pale ale malt0.75 lb. (0.34 kg) dark Munich
Wheatwine
Gordon Strong provides readers with a recipe for a wheatwine. “Stan Hieronymus writes in Brewing with Wheat that wheatwine has its origins in modern American craft brewing, but that it was not intentional. A happy accident produced a higher gravity American wheat ale. The first modern commercial version is credited to Rubicon Brewing Company (Sacramento, California) in 1988, but many breweries now produce it as a limited edition winter release. Some examples are vintage-dated and oak-aged, suggesting they likely will continue to improve with age.”
The Driveway Barley Wine
Mitch Steele, former Head Brewer and Production Manager at Stone Brewing Co., and now Brewmaster and Co-Founder of New Realm Brewing in Atlanta, Georgia, provides BYO with a recipe. “I brewed this beer with the Manchester Area Society of Homebrewers (MASH) homebrew club at my home in Bedford, New Hampshire when I was an Assistant Brewer at Anheuser-Busch in Merrimack, New Hampshire.”
