Need help with American Barleywine/Partigyle recipe construction

I'm ready to try my first Barleywine, and would like to do an American Hoppy Barleywine.

I have a 48qt. mashtun, and would like to do the BW from the first runnings only, and then do a small IPA from the second runnings.

Having a hard time figuring out the numbers to get the most wort out of my first runnings.


Thanks

I haven't done the first running/2nd running beer. Its a great idea though and lots do it. Hopefully someone with actual knowledge can chime in.

I'll just say that this year was a great year for Hoppy Barley wines in Michigan. Bell's batch 10,000 Barley wine was nice and hoppy. Founders Nemesis Black Barley wine was 100+ ibu's and it was nothing short of amazing.

Can I just scale the recipe to say 4 gallons in Beersmith? Then use whatever the second runnings are?

Generally what you do is figure out the amount and size of the 2 beers you want and combine it to figure out the total grain bill. How much of each do you want and what OG are you thinking?

I've read that for partigyle, the first running should account for about 2/3 of the points that the grain bill produces, and the second running should account for the other 1/3. I have been wanting to do partigyle for a while and finally achieved it today, but haven't worked out any numbers on it. It's tricky though, and if I were going to plan for it rather than just hoping it comes out that way, I'd add another half in points of what I wanted in the bigger beer, then add like 20% or something just to make sure there's enough sugars in there. We can always water down a high gravity first wort, right?

I also have a 48 qt (rectangular cooler) mash tun and I brewed an american barleywine with the first runnings and a damn fine ESB with the second runnings. What I did was a 1:1 ratio for the mash using 34 lb of grain, mash temp of 149. My recipe was shooting for a grain bill similar to Stone's Old Guardian, using mostly MO. Specifically, 91% MO, 4.5% each of aromatic and dark english crystal (135-165L).

The mash was super thick, and my sparge stuck, but I worked through it by draining what I could then removing most of the grain and adding more water back, thinning it out a bit. I don't have my notes with me, but I think the BW was mostly first runnings, maybe a bit of second runnings to get pre-boil volume. Three or so days into fermentation I boiled up some 3rd runngins that I had frozen, added some more hops and a bunch of sugar and added it to the carboy to help drive the FG down. I ended up at 1.025 FG at 12.5% ABV which might have been a bit too much, as bottle conditioning didn't really work for this one. It was still a great big thick malty beast, and if it had carbonated would likely have been one of my best.

My advice is to focus on hitting your numbers for the first beer (BW) and just let the second beer be what it wants to be. If you end up with a [calculated] post-boil in the 1.050's maybe plan on a hopping rate more for a pale than an IPA. My experience with partigyle has been that if you try to fit a single mash to two recipes, both beers will suffer. For example, even a 1.060+ beer mashed at 149 and then pitched with Cal Ale yeast will likely go below 1.010 with good pitching rates/health, which is pretty darn dry for most beers.

Good luck, partigyle is a great way to drag out the fun of brew day, and at the end you get two different beers!