Glass Bottom Kickstarter Grand Cru (A pilot batch)

I decided this beer is actually a grand cru, rather than a barleywine. Why? What's the difference? It's a complicated question in this case because they're both jumping of points. A barleywine is basically a more balanced, higher alcohol version of an American or English IPA. A grand cru is kind of a catch-all for Belgian high alcohol specialty ale. I'm using a Belgian yeast for the estery/phenolic complexity it will layer on top of everything else; it's a kitchen sink beer, essentially. The yeast makes it a Belgian.

All the elements that make a good barleywine are present in this beer however. The malt character is upped quite a bit from a standard beer – I've used 25% Belgian special B, a dark crystal malt that should leave the beer just shy of cloyingly sweet. The hops are upped as well – nugget for bittering, and ahtanum for flavor and aroma. Ahtanum in my experience is more fruity and floral than the typical American IPA hop, which is all piney/resiney character, and somewhat boring to me simply by virtue of familiarity. The hops were not increased in direct proportion to the malt, so while there will be some hop bitterness to balance the increased maltiness, it's ultimately going to be a malt-forward beer.

There are some special adjuncts added to this batch as well (remember the kitchen sink):

• Rhubarb. This is a sort of offshoot of a test batch we did in fall 2013. The idea was to make a sweet beer and complement it with the addition of sour rhubarb, the same way that a strawberry rhubarb pie is better than just a strawberry pie or rhubarb pie. Here it's the same idea – sweet beer, sour rhubarb - the basic principle behind most alcoholic beverages, especially beer and wine, being balance.

• Lemon zest. This is something that should simply add a layer of citrus-like complexity to an already complex, fruity beer.

• Rose hips. Evan and I both agree that rose hips smell like a good cigar – that kind of sweet, fruity, leathery aroma that may be how tobacco actually smells, or may be something that tobacconists add to cigars for flavoring. Unfortunately, I don't know how much rose hip flavor was absorbed into the beer. I made them a flameout addition, and in hindsight I don't think that was the correct usage. A 10-minute steep in the boil would probably have been the right call.

That's the concept anyway. Execution is another (horror) story.

Questions or comments?