First Parti-gyle

I thought my first "partigyle" deserved my first post. Been a daily reader for 1.5 years now.

I had the day off today (thanks Dr. King, RIP) and it was the first day in over 2 years that I had the entire house to myself. The wife had to work, and daycare was open and I had to pay for it whether I sent the kids or not.

I had decided to brew a barleywine and a brown ale. 5 gallons of each.

I started with:

25 lbs Gambrinus Pale Malt
1 lb Caramel 20L
0.25 lb Caramel 60L
0.5 lb Caramel 120L
0.25 lb Special B
1 oz Chocolate Malt

Mashed with 7.8 Gal H20 at 149 for 90 min.

Hop Bill
0.5 Centennial (12.1%) FWH
0.5 Cascade (5.5%) FWH
2.5 oz Magnum (12%) 60 min
1 oz Cluster (7.9%) 60 min
0.5 Centennial (7.9) 0 min
0.5 Cascade (5.5) 0 min

Put 4.75 Gal (OG 1.105) on an US-05 cake. Original recipe had an OG of 1.110 so I may boil a little corn sugar and add it in a few days to get the gravity up to match my IBU's.

I only have one pot big enough to boil in so I had time to re-mash with a few specialty grains for the Northern Brown Ale.

Added to the mash:

1 lb Brown Malt
0.5 lb Special Roast
0.25 lb Victory

and mashed for another 90 min at 152.

drained and added

1 oz US Goldings (4.5%) 60 min

Then I messed up:

I checked my gravity sample for the Brown and it read 1.032. Had 1.045 written on the board. Quickly added 0.66 lbs of 2 year old Light DME. Then thought about it. Hey I forgot to cool the sample/correct for temp. Took temp. 100F. correction increases gravity to 1.035. Probably would have needed some DME anyway. Disappointed. Then while I was consoling myself, I remembered that the 1.045 written on the board was the Starting gravity not the pre-boil gravity.

Well Damn, if I'm gonna have this kinda problems anyway might as well pull a draft and have an excuse. Then I'm sipping and thinking, maybe my volume will be a little off and I can top off with filtered water. Wouldn't you know it it's the first time I end up with exactly 5 Gal in the bucket.

Ended up with 5 gal. at 1.055 of Brown.

Cleaned up, made some dog treats with the spent grains, put em in the oven and went to pick the kids up from daycare. All in all I'm pleased. It was a great day. Hope yours was good too.

1.055 isn't excessive for a Brown, I probably would have added a half gallon of water to allow for trub. I like to split the hops in a Brown at 60 and 30, it adds a little hop flavor.

Thats an impressive recipe for that BW! Wish I made mine that big...

Sounds like your first partigyle went better than mine. I tried estimating using BeerSmith, and failed miserably. I was trying to hit 1.096 for my big beer at 60% efficiency, and got more like 1.086. My preboil gravity for the small beer was also waaay off, and I ended up having to add a pound and a half of DME to correct it.


EDIT: Although, this just goes to show how much of an idiot I really am. I forgot that I had planned to add 0.5 lbs of palm sugar and .25 lbs of molasses to the fermenter in a couple days, which almost completely accounts for the difference in gravities in the big beer. Still no explanation for the small beer, though.

Wow, nice work! I've been mulling a bigger saison recipe the last couple days and might try my hand at doing a second running for a traditional farmhouse ale that comes in around 3% to enjoy while I'm doing summer yardwork.

What other pitfalls do you think folks might run into other than thinner than expected second runnings? Mash temp while pulling first boil, keeping in mind your second mash is right around the corner is about the only thing I can foresee.

David, I forgot to enter the 20 min addition of 0.5 oz East Kent Goldings on the N. Brown Ale.

Weirdboy: I worked through the numbers using Diesel's spreadsheets which will do parti-gyle calculations. I then double checked and fine tuned things with the calculators that come with BeerSmith to make sure that the water additions would fit in my mash tun.

Riff: You hit on one of my concerns of the quality of the second runnings i did. I think mashing at a 149 for the barleywine is going to lead to a highly fermentable N. Brown Ale. That plus, the second " mash" ended up lasting about 100 min because I had to cool the Barleywine wort, transfer it to the fermenter, and give the kettle a rinse before I could collect the second runnings into it. We'll see.