Our PIRAAT and our GULDEN DRAAK are barley wines and should be served at cellar temperature. Sip them out of the special glass, that will concentrate the aroma. They are excellent with cigars or with dessert.

When you want to age them for many years, buy them in the champagne bottles and lay them down in a dark place with a constant temperature, like a cellar.

To brew a Barley Wine, you have to start from the best Barley and you use plenty of it: at least three times to four times more than what is used in a "normal" beer. Secondly, you need top-quality yeasts that can survive and stay active in such a rich environment, that soon becomes a high alcoholic environment. Most yeasts die or become dormant in a high alcoholic environment. Only a few brewers have cultivated such yeasts over the generations. Thirdly, your beer has to age, the longer the better. A good barley wine can age for ten, twenty or more years. The taste and the complexity of the taste will evolve. These three reasons explain also why only the wealthier families could affort to brew such beer. They had the money, the time and a good reason "to show off".

A Barley Wine is a strong, top-fermenting ale, with an alcohol contents of at least 9 % and up to 13% by volume. It gives the beer a warming quality, which means that you feel the warmth glowing from within when you enjoy these beers. Barley Wines have existed since very very long, but it was at the end of the 17th century that this style of beer was named Barley Wine in England. Several English publications in that era and in the 18th century describe the brewing of these beers. They became "en vogue" when a wealthy merchant class emerged in England and other Northern European Nations, like Holland and Denmark. Every family was fond about their own Barley Wine, often brewed in house or by a local brewer on instruction. It was clearly an alternative for wine. A beer with the same or more complexity in taste and aroma of the wines, that came from the South. Wine has always been the favorite drink of the nobility, the upper class. When the merchants became wealthier and powerful, they brewed to perfection the drink that their families had drank for generations: beer.
(Newsletter January 1997)