Brewing a barleywine with grapes, you say? To create Arquebus—our blonde barleywine—we reverse-engineered the beer. The backstory is that CBC’s Founder Phil “Brewdaddy” Bannatyne came into the brewery one hot August day, and we chatted about his weekend—the highlight of which was a fun dinner at a friend’s house that culminated in a very tasty Sauternes. We discussed how there was essentially nothing in the beer world that suited the desire for a sweet, medium-alcohol, fruity dessert wine. After all, on a hot and humid summer night in Boston, one doesn’t naturally gravitate toward a barrel-aged barleywine or imperial stout, or a Belgian quadruple or double IPA. So we set about to create the dessert beer that would fix that.
We started with a base of several blended Pilsner malts—for “simple” grists on my single-infusion brewhouse we get a lot of pale-malt depth by combining several different Pilsner or pale malts—to create a pale wort of just over 20° Plato (1.083 SG). Sauternes, Tokaji, and other late-harvest wines that benefit from Botrytis cinerea present a particular honeyed character that we mimicked via the use of some hyperlocal honey. The hives were kept inside Boston and Cambridge so the character of the honey from these largely urban bees was incredibly complex and intense. We added the raw honey directly to the fermentor at about 50 percent attenuation for the first few batches, but we now add the honey into the whirlpool to pasteurize without boiling off all the terrific aromatics.
Initially, we didn’t achieve the wine-like flavors we really wanted (the beer was very braggot-y), so we next incorporated white-wine grapes, which we crushed and pressed. The must was added to used white-wine barrels along with a malolactic culture, and the beer was racked on top as it neared its finish. This extra addition of simple sugars right at the end gives the yeast a little junk-food burst of activity. Once the specific gravity gets down below 10° Plato (1.040 SG) we add a wine or champagne yeast to help with the last bit of fermentation, as this beer regularly pushes into the 13–14 percent ABV range. The original grape varieties we used were Viognier and Sauvignon Blanc, but now we mix up the grapes a little every year.