Party Guile Brewing

Party Guile Brewing. I've been thinking about this for awhile and there's a few things about my idea that may be beneficial to other brewers.

First off, I'm not talking about "PARTIGYLE" brewing, I'm talking about "Party Guile" brewing. Historically, partigyle brewing was intended to make three different "classes" of beer out of a single mash. It was meant to make a strong beer, an average beer, and a weak beer. I'm not talking about that.

My goal is to make three radically different beers to satisfy as many people as possible with a minimal expenditure. This isn't about a strong beer, an average beer, and a weak beer. This is about taking the malt in different directions with each turn to make up radically different brews. Here's what I'm thinking...

First off, for the BMC crowd, start with 5-7 lbs of Pils Malt. Mash it. IN the kettle, add two pounds of rice solids and some hops (under about 20 IBU). There you've now got an easy brew session to get you going. The BMC drinkers will have a beer that is very familiar to them, and you won't have put anything into your mash that will alter the taste/quality of your next few beers.

Next on the agenda is a Barleywine. You've just got Pils in there already, it's not really ideal for the style, but it's just going to give you a couple more fermentables, that's all. So just add another 10-15 pounds of two row followed by some Amber DME into your kettle. Now you have a bigger beer but your leftover mash isn't restricted to darker beers because the color was added into the brew kettle, not the MLT.

The relative lack of specialty malts in the MLT will allow you to go crazy with your third beer. So long as you keep it under 5%abv or so there should be enough fermentables left. You might want to add a pound or two of 2-row, but that should be enough. Then just add a few pounds of specialty malts for whatever you want for your third beer... a stout? A brown? An amber? An IPA? Maybe even a wheat!!! Extract as much as you can out of whatever remains in the MLT.


The idea here is that you can use the "Party Guile" system to make three party-hit beers by using everything at your disposal... including DME... to make your brew sessions more cumulative, striking a balance between cost and efficiency- using DME to impart the "darker" flavors, but keeping your main mash more neutral until the very end to make it more usable for other styles.

Of course, you could just go progressively darker with each beer and skip the DME and rice solids altogether, but why not use what's available to you? It seems to me that using DME frees up your recipe options to a greater degree. And the easy triple (or quadruple??) brew session will help you fill your fermenters in a hurry!

Anybody have any thoughts of multi mashing? aka Party Guile brewing? :fro:

Or to do it another way, use a 2-3 gallon kettle and mash/steep your specialty grains in there. Use your MLT for your base malts. Then you can make your different flavors right there on the stove top.

Love this idea!!

(why is there not more responses?)

This is my first search for this idea, maybe there is some other threads....

If one of your brews was a 90 minute boil, you could steep specialty grains as a partial mash right before your first hop addition. I don't know how much you want to reduce your liquid by though.

Sonic boom!

I like this idea too.

Maybe the lack of enthusiasm was due to people worried about reproducibility. What if you REALLY liked the third beer that came out using this system? To truly recreate it one might have to brew the other two first!

I dunno.

Decent idea, sounds like a long brew day with a lot to keep track of though.

I like the cut of the OP's jig but I think there are better ways to make vastly different beers from a single mash. Gordon Strong's book has some ideas, competition shows on TBN have more.

Just to throw a few out.

Make a pale beer, split the wort, add cold steeped dark grains to one fermenter to make a darker version.

Brew a helles (lightly hopped, pils malt, 1.050 or a bit lower). Split the wort and add about 15% sugar to one and pitch a belgian yeast to make a belgian blonde.

Brew a barleywine hopped moderately. Run off half and pitch english yeast and dry hop with Goldings. English Barleywine. Add a bunch of US hops and boil another 15 minutes to get more bitterness then dryhop with more US hops. American Barleywine.

Brew an IIPA and add sinamar to get a black IIPA (if you add a ton, like half a tablespoon per 12 oz bottle, you get some roast flavor). Add fruit extract to get a fruit IIPA (won an NHC gold this way).

Add melomel to make a fruit beer (via Gordon Strong via Curt Stock). This is a great technique if you make melomel. Let people make their own blend when they come over.

Wow. Double zombie. This wins

Guess42 said:

Wow. Double zombie. This wins

Click to expand...

What have we won, Johnny?

Interesting idea to use DME to make completely different beers. It's also worth noting that color fades a lot after your first runnings. I make a barley wine a few times a year that is fairly dark, but my second runnings always make a great bitter.

Last time I did this, I added a bit of crystal 40, crystal 60, and some pale chocolate malt before my second mash (I needed to convert those) and had a decent mild come from my second runnings.