Uber-long Primary?

[socal2009]

I have a question about how long a beer can sit in primary. I brewed two big beers back in June, a Barleywine and an Old Ale. After doing some research on the forum, and seeing what Papazian and Palmer had to say about primary vs secondary and the minimal dangers of autolysis these days, I decided to just leave them in primary. If nothing else I figured it'd be a great experiment. I was planning on bottling the Barleywine this month and adding bourbon/oak cubes to the Old Ale and continuing to let it age before I deployed to the sandbox so I'd have some delicious beer and some well aged Old Ale ready for bottling when I returned. Unfortunately, I just found out that my deployment date has been pushed up by like half a month. This significantly compresses the amount of time I have to take care of everything I need to do, and unfortunately homebrew falls to the bottom of the list. I'm not even sure I'll have time to bottle the Barleywine at this point. On top of that, the empty better bottle that I was going to use to secondary the Old Ale with the bourbon/oak cubes got a dent in the side of it and now I'm worried about O2 permeability. Anyone know if I can leave these in primary for another 6-8 months with no ill effects, or will I come back to beer that tastes like crap?

 

[jtkratzer]

I left my first two batches of Äpfelwein in the primary for 9 months, on the yeast, never racked to a secondary before bottling and the stuff is amazing. Wine yeast vs beer yeast... No idea, but I've never had trouble with 2-3 month primaries before.

Do you have kegs? If so, rack to a keg, put some gas on it to purge the air out and forget about it until you get back.

 

[socal2009]

That's a negative on the kegs. One is better bottle carboy, the other a brewing bucket. I just want to be certain that leaving these two beers on the yeast for something like 15 months isn't going to destroy them. Nothing worse than coming back from deployment to bad beer!

 

[brettclutch]

If I lived near you I would offer to maybe coordinate with a friend or family of yours to do the bottling when you wanted to do it while your on deployment for you. So that you had nice good beer ready when you came back. Unfortunately unable to since I'm in Denver, Godspeed sir.

 

[squirrelly]

I think you'll be just fine to let it ride. Your barley wine will only get better with age. In fact my wife and I brewed a batch that will be cracked open on my son's 21st birthday. He will be 2 in Jan.

If this was a wheat beer I'd say you'd have cause for concern, but being that the gravity of the barley wine should be high enough, you will have a nice treat when you return from your tour.

 

[urbanmyth]

If I lived near you I would offer to maybe coordinate with a friend or family of yours to do the bottling when you wanted to do it while your on deployment for you. So that you had nice good beer ready when you came back. Unfortunately unable to since I'm in Denver, Godspeed sir.

Seconded.