Alternative for Barleywine

Food & Drink, Events and Entertainment
1
Got a Christmas Pudding recipe that calls for 7cl of Barleywine. Any recommended alternatives?

2
Diamond white.

3
I imagine any high gravity beer (something craft, not the malt liquor or anything) should do the trick. Maybe like a dogfish head 90 minute, or something similar, from drinks of the world.

4
Not really. Dogfish head is an IPA and is 90 IBU. This means it will impart bitterness to the finished product. A barleywine shouldn't be bitter, typically it would have less IBU than that at the same time it's higher in ABV, so it's sweeter to start with.

If I was looking to replace barleywine in a recipe, I would replace it with a big Russian Imperial Stout.

5
Guinness?

6
If you sent them to Drinks of the World, why not get a Barley Wine style beer?

7
Guinness is a pretty low ABV beer and on top of it, it has quite a noticeable acidic taste. Quite the opposite of a barleywine which is high abv and flavor and sweet rather than acidic

8
I've never found Guinness to be acidic. I was riffing on the theme of stout. If a sweet wine is needed... some sort of sherry?

9
Do you think the OP is still trying to find this? It’s a bit late for his Christmas pudding unless he wants to make one well in advance for Christmas 2019.

10
Could be planing an antipodian Christmas, just like in OZ.

11
Guinness uses bret lacto cultures along with their normal yeast and this is why the beer is slightly sour

Re barleywine, it's not actually wine at all, its beer, but it's called "wine" to signal that it's much higher ABV than other beers and is closer to wine in that regard. Wine typically will have much less sugars left after fermentation as the wine yeast consumes more types of sugar compared to the two families of beer yeast which always leave residual sugar. Hence, in a recipe if one replaces a barleywine/stout with wine the sweetness of the final product will be different.

12
It won't be *quite* the same but you could look at a German Doppelbock or a beer like Samichlaus (Austria) or a Thomas Hardy's (UK/Italy) which are also sweet and thick like barleywine. You can them all at DotW.