Picked up the Wee Heavy kit during the sale, planning to brew it this weekend and let it age for a good long time to be ready for the fall/winter. Its probably going to be our 12/21 End of The World beer.
I’ve heard different methods for aging and I’m curious as to a general consensus as to the best way to do this one. Should we go 1 month primary, 1 month secondary and then 6-7 months bottle age? Would it be better to spend more time in bulk aging and less time in bottles?
Any thoughts/recommendations on this would be appreciated!
That one moth, one month, then bottle plan will work well probably. Ive seen a lot of people debate bulk aging verse bottle aging, but I have seen much of a difference.
Skotrat’s Traquair House clone recipe has the beer in brite tank (carboy topped up or keg purged of oxygen) held after fermentation at 45F for two months, prior to bottling. I used this method in a temp-controlled chamber and it worked very well, but don’t forget to add FRESH dry, or harvested/refrigerated in sterile water, bottling yeast. I don’t see why you couldn’t be colder and shorter time in te brite tanks, and then wait longer after bottling before drinking, so long as the yeast had dropped out prior to bottling.
I found out never to use a previously opened package of dry yeast for bottling yeast (or any other use); that is recently I did that and it gave a plastic-y, bandaid wild yeast phenols fault to 6 gallons of up-til-bottled very nice Oud Kriek I brewed.
