We investigate to which extent and under which circumstances false vacuum energy (V 0 ) dominated slow-roll inflation is compatible with a large tensor-to-scalar ratio r = O(0.1), as indicated by the recent BICEP2 measurement. With V 0 we refer to a constant contribution to the inflaton potential, present before a phase transition takes place and absent in the true vacuum of the theory, like e.g. in hybrid inflation. Based on model-independent considerations, we derive an upper bound on the possible amount of V 0 domination and highlight the importance of higher-order runnings of the scalar spectral index (beyond α s ) in order to realise scenarios of V 0 dominated inflation. We study the conditions for V 0 domination explicitly with an inflaton potential reconstruction around the inflaton field value 50 e-folds before the end of inflation, taking into account the present observational data. To this end, we provide the up-to-date parameter constraints within ΛCDM + r + α s + κ s using the cosmological parameter estimation code Monte Python together with the Boltzmann code CLASS. 1