Barley Wine: Mt. Everest of Ales
These are biggest and strongest beers produced by their brewers
April, 1998byDickEantwell and FalAllen
The History
of the Style
The brewing of the first barley wine is something lost in the steam from perhaps a hundred British brewkettles. There is no particular date affixed to the accomplishment, nor were the beers produced likely to be referred to as such. It's necessary to review early brewing procedure to understand how beers of the starting gravities and alcohol content we associate with modern barley wines came to be produced, and how the style emerged over time. Farmhouse brewing, practiced throughout the brewing regions of Europe and the British isles, very often produced more than one brew from a single mash. The heftiest first runnings were boiled separately to yield the biggest beers, leaving the mash to be re-infused with brewing liquor for the brewing of smaller beers of lower gravity. These smaller beers were drunk young, but the stronger brews were generally stored to be drunk later, since their elevated alcoholic content kept them from spoiling. This practice continues in some breweries to this day, and is known as the parti-gyle system.
As with innumerable other things involving precedent, the emergence of barley wine as a distinctly named style begins with No. 1. In 1854 the Burton firm of Bass, Ratcliff and Gretton began producing a Strong Burton Ale which by merit of the fact that it was their biggest and strongest ale bore No. 1 as its product designation. Bass in those days of less sophisticated marketing merely numbered its ales, the greater numbers signifying beers of lesser gravity; the dark beers affixed with a P, such as P1 Imperial Stout and P6 Porter. The No. 1 was also emblazoned with a red diamond, differentiating it from the familiar red triangle of Bass Pale Ale. These two geometric figures, incidentally, became, in the late 1870s, Britain's first registered trademarks. The beer was prized, and quite popular, and unlike most other contemporary big beers produced by parti-gyle, was the result of a single brew. It was also relatively pale, in contrast with the commonly dark strong ales of the time.
By 1903 the words Barley Wine appeared on the label, setting another precedent soon to be copied by other British brewers. To suggest, however, that the development of barley wine can be so easily traced to the product line of a single brewery is to leave out much of what is confusing and compelling about the evolution of big beer brewing in Britain.
Barley Wine and Old Ale
Since the term "barley wine" did not come into general use until the early years of the twentieth century, the net of scholarship must be cast broadly in order to capture earlier designations, often used interchangeably, such as "old,' "strong" and "stock" ale. Not all of them would qualify as barley wines by modern, or even perhaps contemporary definition, but they were the biggest and strongest beers produced by their brewers, and therefore can justifiably be considered the precursors of the style. And since some of these designations have survived in variously interpreted efforts by both British and American brewers throughout the intervening decades and centuries, they provide both historical antecedent and ongoing comparative reference.
Not only was it possible for the strongest ales to be laid down and kept, in some cases, for years, it was desirable because of the gradual melding and improvement of the flavors over time. In addition to being generically referred to as "strong" ales, these beers were often called "old," simply because they were kept for a long time before being consumed. Another term in common use was "stock ale," since the beer, as it matured, was considered a provision, or stock. These ales were also often used for blending, lending character and complexity to more ordinary beers. Sometimes they were simply thinned out later in order to produce more of a lesser beer, thereby prefiguring the high-gravity brewing procedure widely employed by today's macro-brewers. In addition, because of the widespread use of unlined wood in both fermentation and storage, these big old beers were commonly affected by the flavors imparted by resident micro-flora. Time was no doubt an agent of their integration as well. This sour, or "vinous" character recurs throughout the history of the description of these aged ales, and seems to have most strongly latched onto the category of old ale as it has veered somewhat away from the path taken by modern barley wine brewing. Though the terms "strong" and "old" continue to be appended to the names of British and American ales of relatively large size, the name "stock ale" seems to have all but exclusively emigrated to America, where in the nineteenth century it marked beers of greater strength and flavor than the more quaffable products of daily commerce. Just the same, few big beers were brewed in America until fairly recently, and the term "stock ale" was an indicator merely of relative strength, and not of unparalleled power. These days it lives on only as a meaningless, vaguely venerable-sounding term to decorate beer labels and clutter classification.
Barley Wines
in Modern Times
During the first half of the twentieth century, Bass's numerical designation became familiar enough to consumers for other brewers, such as Tennent's, to identify their barley wines as No. 1, frequently in conjunction with various other trade names. Tennent's also claims credit for the idea of a pale barley wine (as opposed to the darker, more traditional versions), but not until 1951. It may have been paler than No. 1, but the break from a darker tradition had already been made by the time the Gold Label came on the scene. Dark and pale barley wines were a common sight on the commercial brewing landscape in Britain through much of the twentieth century, but the combination of wartime malt rationing and the British systems of taxation based on starting gravity and alcoholic strength brought harder times to the production of really big beers. Forced into an increasingly rarified niche, barley wines underwent some interesting, mainly self-destructive, permutations resulting in marketing campaigns bullishly concentrating on alcoholic strength and a group of beers, some still knocking about England, billing themselves as barley wines but standing the hydrometer in the hardly Homeric 1.050s and 60s. "Strong as a Double Scotch--Less than Half the Price" blared advertisements for Tennent's Gold Label in the 1970s, seeming to appeal to the hammerheaded heavy drinker on a budget. Despite what such marketing techniques would have us believe, demand for these biggest of ales has decreased in the United Kingdom to the extent that aside from a couple of heavyweight national brands, the brewing of barley wines has declined to the occasional, the commemorative and the novel. It should be mentioned that through all the adversity of rationing and taxation, through the attempts to glorify via advertising various other products taking a run at number one, Bass never halted production of its barley wine until the decision came to discontinue the product in 1995.
In 1968 the Eldridge Pope brewery in Dorchester, England began producing Thomas Hardy Ale in commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the author's death. Brewed entirely of pale malt to a gravity of approximately 1.125, the beer is aged for 6 months after fermentation and vintage dated. The label, replete with a quote from Hardy's "The Trumpet Major," boasts that the beer will age effectively for 25 years or more. At about 12 per cent alcohol by volume, the beer was reckoned by the Guinness Book of World Records the strongest beer on earth in 1973, though in subsequent years the distinction has variously passed into other hands. The Hardy Ale, with its vinous flavors and russet hues, conjures to many more the qualities of a classic old ale, but in name it is usually reckoned a barley wine. All this despite the fact that it is brewed with a lager yeast at ale fermentation temperatures. These days it is the beer that keeps its down-at-heel parent brewery afloat financially, a facility renamed the Thomas Hardy Brewery, which sadly devotes much of its energies to producing and packaging alcoholic fruit drinks.
Another British Barley Wine well worth a mention is Prize Old Ale, produced by the George Gale Brewery in Horndean. Though named an old ale, Gale's current brewmaster reckons it a barley wine based mainly on an alcoholic content above 9 per cent by volume. It does, however, bear some of the characteristics of an older style of big beer brewing such as a relatively dark color and a pronounced lactic acid character, due no doubt to its fermentation in unlined wood. Also noteworthy are Young's Old Nick and Fuller's Golden Pride, which, interestingly enough, is still produced by parti-gyle, later runnings going to produce London Pride and Chiswick Bitter.
American Barley Wine
In 1975 San Francisco's Anchor Brewing released Old Foghorn, a pale, sweet barley wine style ("style" because of a regulatory ruling by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms demanding a modifier for the word "wine") ale of 1.100 starting gravity. Bottled in six-ounce "nips" and now and then kegged for draft sales, the beer became prized by connoisseurs of the growing microbrewery movement, turning up farther afield than official distribution networks would prescribe. Within a few years Sierra Nevada Brewing in Chico, California offered Bigfoot, a fiercely hoppy barley wine which varies slightly in color year to year. The Bigfoot as well is coveted, as only limited quantities are allowed outside of California. These remain the preeminent American Barley wines in terms of style and, for all their vagaries, market availability.
The late 1980s and early 1990s have witnessed a wave of barley wine brewing, in which the style has become almost de rigeur in the trotting out of accomplishments on the parts of small brewers, to the extent that it ranks as one of the most popular and most hotly contested entries at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, the nation's biggest and most authoritative competitive beer event. Brewpubs seem most likely to brew them, since the extra expense of a single legendary batch is more easily justifiable than it might be in a larger, more ongoing and more accounting-driven production setting. Their release can also constitute something of a staged event, most often around the winter holidays, anticipated, and in many cases later bemoaned, by loyal patrons. It could in fact be argued that with the popularity of barley wine brewing on the parts of small American producers, barley wine, along with India Pale Ale, is one of the beer styles nurtured and these days kept most alive in the United States.
There is something of a stylistic continental divide where the brewing of American barley wines is concerned, with western, and particularly Northwestern examples turning out more heavily hopped than their eastern counterparts. Rogue Brewing's Old Crustacean and Pike Brewing's Old Bawdy are excellent barley wines along these lines. Such is not always the case, however, as Brooklyn Brewing's Monster bitterly attests. McNeill's Brewery in Brattleboro, Vermont is also known to dry hop their barley wine for well over a year.
The New Golden Age
of Barley Wine
Time, fortunately, has brought about scrutiny and scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic where barley wine is concerned, though not what more sharply defined Germanic styles have generated. Continued commercial and tax pressures in Britain have relegated all but a few examples of the style to production history in the U.K., a golden age (tolerating deep copper and even russet examples) of barley wine brewing now reigns in America. Brewers here overdo it from summer to fall, producing beers bigger, maltier, hoppier and more alcoholic than anything existing in fact or history, or so hopes run. These are the beers with which brewers exhibit their chops--their mastery of extract and isomerization, of patience and technique. And when colleague and customer can be seen smiling and sodden, failing against the blasts of excess imprisoned in a well-made barley wine, the brewer can know, for an instant or an evening, that he or she has won.
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Dick Cantwell and Fal Allen are well-known and widely respected Seattle brewers. Their book on barley wine, part of the Classic Beer Styles series of Brewer's Publications, is due to be released this Spring.
