While few things deserve legendary status, in the beer world, that description is easily claimed by the most colossal of beers, barley wine. Massive in strength, chameleon-like and wide-ranging in profile, barley wines represent the biggest and often the best of the brewer’s art. They can be comforting or naughty, friendly or adversarial, inviting or intimidating. Bursting with malt, they are often buttressed with a sturdy brace of hops. Barley wines can be stored and enjoyed years after their release, gaining a complexity over the years not unlike fine wine. Barley wines are the headliner, the main course in a brewer’s portfolio.
Barley wines can be stored and enjoyed years after their release.
Ye Olde Strong Beer
Brewing methods have changed or been refined dramatically over the centuries. Even some of the most basic steps in the process were omitted or done differently in the past, to the point where today’s brewers would look at old-time brewing as being downright archaic.
For example, in order to make efficient use of the grains, brewers today employ a practice known as sparging. This is a steady sprinkle of hot water at the top of the grain bed in the mash tun to rinse the grain and eke out as much as possible of the flavor, fermentables, and essence of the ingredients into the brew kettle. This allows the brewer to have precise control over the strength of the brew.
In earlier times, instead of sparging, a method known as parti-gyle brewing was used. Parti-gyle is the art of making two or more beers from a single mash. The grains were crushed, loaded into the mash tun, and the hot mashing liquor was added. After the designated period of time, the sweet, luscious nectar was drained without sparging. This was the first beer of the lot. The effluent wort was staggeringly dense and the forerunner of today’s barley wines. The grain was then re-saturated and drained again, producing a much weaker wort and subsequently a much smaller beer. This might have been repeated up to three or four times to make beers of varying strength. The strongest would be for local people of status; the weakest, for children, women or servants.
Parti-gyle brewing is still practiced today in some breweries. The Belgian designations of tripel, dubbel, and single are remnants of this method, though today’s beers bearing those names are so different from one another that it is obvious that they are made from their own respective mash. Breweries in Scotland and England also use the process to limited degree.
