Brewing an extra 5 gallons

[brewprint]

Brewing an 11 gallon batch of a Dirty Bastard clone this weekend. It is something like 35lbs of grain. I'm doing a full volume no sparge batch. Hoping to get 75% efficiency with a circulating mash.

The plan after I mash out was to take the grain, split it in half, and then put it into my 12 gallon pot with my chiller water. Basically do sort of a dunk sparge type thing but 2 times because I don't want to overwhelm my bag.

The goal is to get a 5.5 gallon batch of beer by rinsing the grain. I'm not shooting for the 1.08 gravity like the original beer, I'm just seeing what I can get and maybe get a light scotch ale or something.

Has anyone done something like this before?

 

[meatcleaver]

I think you're gonna want to read up on partigyle brewing.
this'll get you started...
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/wiki/index.php/Parti-gyle

 

[BeardedBrews]

https://byo.com/mead/item/1963-parti-gyle-brewing-techniques

For sure, pretty common practice years ago.

 

[brewprint]

Thanks. I wasn't sure where to look.

cheers!

 

[kh54s10]

I have tried to partigyle a couple of times trying to get a 1.030 to 1.045 beer from the original 1.100 grainbed. Five gallons both times. The better one came out at 1.020 and the other was 1.010. On the 1.010 I ended up adding 6-8 more pounds of grain and got to about 1.030. The 1.020 I added DME and got to about 1.040.

I have to read up some more because it certainly was not worth the effort.

 

[brewprint]

I think that what we may do is use that as mash water and mash some more grain in there.

Did you do a no sparge on the original beer?

 

[jmcquesten]

Brewing an 11 gallon batch of a Dirty Bastard clone this weekend. It is something like 35lbs of grain. I'm doing a full volume no sparge batch. Hoping to get 75% efficiency with a circulating mash.

The plan after I mash out was to take the grain, split it in half, and then put it into my 12 gallon pot with my chiller water. Basically do sort of a dunk sparge type thing but 2 times because I don't want to overwhelm my bag.

The goal is to get a 5.5 gallon batch of beer by rinsing the grain. I'm not shooting for the 1.08 gravity like the original beer, I'm just seeing what I can get and maybe get a light scotch ale or something.

Has anyone done something like this before?

I just did this a couple weeks ago. Brewed 10 gallons of a big stout. I split the grain in half and did 2 mashes. The stout was about 80% first runnings. I held some of the first runnings off to the side while sparging to the volume/gravity desired for the stout. That left me with a very little first runnings and like 5 gallons of (1.030) second runnings. I figured that would contribute color and flavor to a brownish type beer. I also added some dry extract to it to get it up to a decent sg. I boiled that next to the stout and hopped it with different hop and pitched a different yeast. It ended up boiling off more than I expected so I actually added water to it in the fermenter.

This was a last minute decision and it was completely an experiment. I don't know what to expect from the finished product since I had no way of accounting for the contributions of the specialty malts. I'm guessing it will be a brown ale or something like a mild, but it will definitely be beer and the extra effort got me a bonus (not free) batch of beer. It will help if you have a refractometer and some dry extract on hand for any adjustments during the process.

I looked at some of the party gyle calculators, but the base beer wasn't quite strong enough to work with them, so I just threw it together and adjusted along the way. I'll know how it turns out in about 2 weeks.

 

[chickypad]

Yeah I think the problem with your plan is trying to do a 2/3, 1/3 split - which means you've already "sparged" that grain pretty well prior to doing the final collection. Partigyle is typically the reverse, i.e. a much thicker mash with the first runnings making up the first beer and the sparge making up the second beer, so that it's like a 1/3, 2/3 split or a 1/2, 1/2 split. I think you'd be down under 1.020 for that second beer.

 

[jmcquesten]

Yeah I think the problem with your plan is trying to do a 2/3, 1/3 split - which means you've already "sparged" that grain pretty well prior to doing the final collection. Partigyle is typically the reverse, i.e. a much thicker mash with the first runnings making up the first beer and the sparge making up the second beer, so that it's like a 1/3, 2/3 split or a 1/2, 1/2 split. I think you'd be down under 1.020 for that second beer.

This is pretty close to what happened to me. The big beer has to be very big. I was only shooting for a starting gravity on my stout of 1.086, but I was making 10 gallons so it still required a lot of grain. More than I could mash in my mash tun at once. The second runnings mixed with the little bit of 1st runnings only got me to 1.030 with like 6 gallons preboil. 3 lbs dme would have been good, but the boil off was crazy so I ended up with around 4.5 gallons at 1.076. I added bottled water till it was at 1.060 which got me about 5.5 gallons in the fermenter.

And yes, my situation was kind of opposite of what most do. If I would have done 5 gallons of the big beer, I could have done 10 of the smaller one a little easier.

 

[brewprint]

That's all making sense.

I think what I'll do is check the gravity with the refractometer and I may just use the 'second runnings' as mash water and add some base malt for the mash.