Fall will be here in 3 weeks. Cool weather is coming

Time to think of a beer to serve with christmas dinner. A beer to serve with the Christmas pudding. A spiced barleywine would be the thing: strong, dark and spicy, perfect compliment to the pudding, strong, dark and spicy.

A barleywine needs aging so our Cbristmas Ale needs to be brewed soon! (Strong beers have a very strong alcohol taste so need aging. With the high alcohol and hopping these beers will be enjoyed with the next few christmass dinners, if they don’t all get drunk in the winter after that Christmass

We need a lot of fermentables—one way to do it with limited mash tun space is to brew a smaller volume, 15L or 18L instead of 22.

Nothing stopping a barley wine being pale—the wort will darken with caramelisation in the longer boil to get enough hop utilisation in our high gravity wort so not pale like an IPA. Allow for up to 3 hour boils—but we want an ale to match the Christmas pud!

So we can start with a nice malt—Maris Otter or Golden Promise or even a good German Pilsner malt, slightly paler than an ale malt.

We want to add some color. We could just add some chocolate malt but let us build in some nice complexity:

60% pale malt
35% Munich malt—a slightly roasted malt
5% darker malt, maybe a few grams of Brown Malt—this can add a roughness to the beer so less rather than more, some amber malt, say 3x the amount of brown malt and the rest chocolate malt—a chocolate brown malt. Wyerman make a chocolate malt where they mill the outer husk from the grains—you can just mash this malt with the rest.

Barleywines are English. If our barley wine has an alcohol by volume of 8% I would add 90-100 IBU of low alpha acid hops, Goldings and Fuggles. Fuggles gives a citrusy aroma matching the citrus peel in the christmas pud! Plenty bitterness, over the months of ageing this will slowly change into flavor.

Spices. To stand up to the pud, we need to spice our beer. We add the spices when there are 15 minutes left in the boil and again when we turn the heat off—this “fixes” the flavor/aroma of the spices. What spices? Take your pick:

1. Cassia 2-3 sticks (do NOT add real cinnamon, your beer will be undrinkably bitter!)

2. Cloves, 5-6

3 Cardamon pods—whatever amount you fancy, 3-5 minimum.

4. Star anise, 2-3 stars

5. Mace

6. Nutmeg—crack a “nut” of nutmeg, put a piece say 1/4 the size of the nut in the wort.

7. Nettles, marijuana or coriander. NO! These make your beer as minty as toothpaste, not what we are after at all! No greens except hops in a beer! 

8. Grains of Paradise—NO, these tiny. cardamom pods put a peppery flavor in the beer

9. King Tut’s Mummified Dick, aka dried galangal, absolutely

10. Ginger—NO! Ginger can easily taste coarse in a beer.

OK, one other note. If you are going for the heroic end of the barleywine scale (9-10% abv) then add some sugar to the wort at the end of the boil. I used to toss in a 2Kg bucket of blue gum honey after turning the heat off from under a 12% Russian Imperial Stout, turning that into a 14% RIS so adding .5-1Kg of honey at end of boil be good. Lyles Golden Syrup is pure invert sugar, add a can of that if you like (just take the lid off and carefully add it to the wort immediately after turning the heat off.) The honey/syrup ferments 100% giving you a slightly drier beer.

Aerate the wort well in the first couple of days after pitching the yeast—this is a big ferment, tough on the yeast as the alcohol climbs. I would even pitch a packet of Nottingham ale yeast to finish off some sugars then drop out really clear. Ferment, rack, cold condition, bottle into stubbies, not 750ml bottles! Cellar for some months, to Christmas Day is ideal. Hmmm depending on FG maybe bulk store and not bottle until late October. You wouldn’t need to prime I fancy, still be sugars to ferment I fancy. The stronger the barley wine the longer it needs to be bulk aged.

Imagine the next winter. You have poured a stubby of this heroic ale into a big brandy balloon, you sit by the fire gently swirling the glass, sipping slowly, luxuriously, taking your time and enjoying this amazing beer. As you do this the warming from your hand and the oxygen in the air are subtly changing, improving the beer. A sybaritic pleasure.


If you can’t brew Coopers Vintage Ale would be a nice barley wine to try.