Beer Style: Strong Ale Family
Gordon Strong’s English Barleywine
“They develop such depth when well-made, well-packaged, and well-kept, changing and maturing over the years like fine red wine.” – Gordon Strong
Gordon Strong’s Belgian Blond Ale
I’ve played around with this recipe several times, and like the balance it has now but I always have ideas of things I’d like to try. It’s a fairly simple grain bill, and I like to use Belgian malts (Dingemans, specifically) for the grains.
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.”
Sir Walter Scotch Ale
Pete Rahn, QC Supervisor at Magic Hat Brewing Co. provides a recipe to BYO from his homebrew collection. “My brother went to Scotland for a year. I brewed this Scotch ale the day he left and conditioned it for the year he was gone.”
The BISness Belgian Imperial Stout
Kyle Larson, Brewer at Double Mountain Brewery in Hood River, Oregon provides a recipe to BYO from his homebrew collection.
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.”
Parti Like It’s 1700
Parti-gyle is an under-utilized technique in the brewing world, which is capable of producing multiple beer types during a single brew day. Here is a recipe from Aaron Hyde outlining a parti-gyle recipe which uses a 1⁄3 and 2⁄3 split of the mash, with the smaller volume Wee Heavy collected first and the larger volume Scottish Export being collected second.
Dogfish Head Craft Brewery’s Raison D’etre clone
According to Dogfish Head’s website “A deep mahogany, Belgian-style brown ale brewed with beet sugar, raisins and Belgian-style yeast.”
Belgian Dubbel
We decided on a simple grain bill for our dubbel to allow the yeast to express that Belgian character of fruity esters and some spicy phenols in the aroma that so many of us enjoy when we first take a sip of a well-made dubbel.
Belgian Tripel
This tripel has a standard grain bill and a process like our Belgian dubbel with one twist —the addition of Weyermann Abbey malt. The Abbey malt gives the finished Tripel more malt character that the best commercial examples in Belgium all have.
Belgian Quad
We keep the IBUs on the low side for this beer in relation to the style because we like the hops to take a backseat to the rich malt and yeast characters in this beer. The more this beer attenuates and dries out the more the hop flavor will come through in the final flavor.
Burton Ale: Style Profile
Burton ale was the beer that originally put Burton on the map, beer-wise. It pre-dates IPA, and was a big export beer to the Baltic countries from about 1740 to 1822.
