Barleywine 2021

Our latest heritage recipe is a recreation of a Barleywine from the early 20th Century. Based on a small mountain of Marris Otter, with a chunk of Simpson's Imperial malt, there's a really nice malty honey backbone to this beer. And then there's the hops... If the malt was a small mountain then the hops are positively Himalayan. I had to check and recheck the bitterness calculation as it was a crazy amount of hops in the boil. The original would've been aged for months before being packaged so it would've rounded out a fair amount before being released.

After fermentation we transferred most of the beer into Moscatel Barrels for ageing, with a small amount split into Red wine barrels and a tiny remainder being bottled, so people get a chance to try the pre aged version. The beer currently available in 330ml bottles is this un-aged version (though it has had a fair amount of time in bottles) and the bitterness is still very firm. Its interesting to think that the big breweries of the early 20th century were still making beer in ways which took so long, designing beer that took a year or so to mature before packaging and being sold. Much of this changed in the latter half of the 20th century.