Knights of the Barleywine

Our local brewery held their second annual Knights of the Barleywine event today — they made a high-gravity barleywine mash and a couple dozen or homebrewers setup propane burners in the parking lot to brew.  My normal inclination, when presented with an all-pale ale mash clocking in at 1.100 SG, would be to use a Belgian yeast and make a quad.  But we just kegged one of those, so we wound up deciding on a more traditional English ale yeast, and East Kent Goldings for flavor and aroma hops (though still considerably less than what many people use for barleywine).

This was my first time brewing outdoors on a propane burner.  After a slow start, I was comfortable cranking up the gas and getting a quick and steady boil.  It was a lot of fun hanging out and chatting with the other brewers.  And pretty much everybody brought some homebrew to sample, so I tasted a few barleywines from last year, plus pale ale, cream ale, Scotch ale and even a Raspberry saison.  We speculated that we collectively brewed about 100 gallons (3 barrels).  There was several pallets of spent grain like this one.