Partigyle & Extract

[GoodTruble]

Just continuing to beat this dead horse in case some homebrewer in 2029 is bored and wants to keep reading these journal entries.

Tapped the Scottish Strong Ale tonight, and it is excellent. I've made a lot of good beers using this brewing approach, but the Wee Heavy and Scottish Strong Ale may be the best combo yet. They were also one of the easier brew days, then used secondary additions to further differentiate them.

On the other end of the spectrum, I did another partigyle double brew day today, but it was anything but easy. I usually boil a large batch of Beer A, then mix some of that with extract and other ingredients to make Beer B. Today I decided to siphon off some of Beer A (pilsner) before the boil, to mix it with extract, then boil Beer B (Tripel) separately after the pilsner. Big mistake. On my kinda slow 110v brewzilla, this took ALL day to do two seprate boils. The whole efficiency of the partigyle approach was lost. I think both beers will turn out fine, but this approach loses a lot of its value/appeal when I forget that Beer B should just be a VERY easy extension of Beer A. I'm keeping that in mind for next time.

 

[GoodTruble]

Just to finish off this thread for the year, my last double brew day was an all-grain wit that is used 2 gallons of to mix with a bunch of DME and overnight cold-soaked dark malts to make a chocolate coconut stout. I then split off 2 more gallons of the wit after primary fermentation to make a raspberry-brandy wit. That gave me three options for the Holiday 6-packs I like to give out. I kegged them all a week ago but haven't had the chance to taste any of them yet due to illness. Hoping to try them all this week.

Only real lesson learned was just to remember to keep beer/batch 2 simple, since that is kind of the point. Bascially, mix part of beer with other stuff, mostly extract. The point is to make another beer with as little added time as possible (more or less).

 

[GoodTruble]

Finally got back to this today. I had a backlog of beer/kegs from all the holiday beers and then did a double batch of pecan brown ale in January (which I did wind up split batching by taking the leftover 5 gallons after kegging and mixing with 3 lbs of dark DME, lactose, and more pecans soaked on pecan flavored whiskey to make Pecan Pie stout. Both turned out good, but the pecan brown ale is amazing. I think it was the yeast that made a big difference - Omega British VIII. Great flavor. Will be be my go-to yeast for English ales going forward).

Anyway, today's pseudo-partigyle was a 8 gallon all-grain Kolsch that I then took 2 gallons to mix with pils DME, wheat LME, and amber LME to make a 6 gallon saison base but using the Omega Jovaru yeast.

Process-wise, the only new thing was that I tried to overnight mash the kolsch. I didn't trust the all-in-one recirculation pump to run all night without issue, so I just programmed the brewzilla to go 2 hours at 148F and then 156F for 4 hours. When i got up, I decided to run the recirculation pump while pushing to 165. To my surprise, the temp gauge dropped from 157 to 127 almost immediately after turning on the pump. Clearly the heat was not being evenly distributed. So I mashed around 156 for another hour and boiled an extra 30 minutes. Will see how it turns out, but I probably won't try overnight mashing again. Not enough benefit versus just setting the timer to preheat the strike water.

Recipe-wise, I usually separately hop the second beer and siphon of wort from the first before before adding its hops. But this time, I just separately did the bittering hop, but waited until the full boil and hop schedule was done to siphon off the all grain beer. Will see how it goes. But it is certainly easier than duel tracking two different hop schedules.

This was a bit of a "kitchen sink" saison where I built a recipe based off what I had around. So fun chance to try out Jovaru. But I very much expect the kolsch will turn out better. Though I've been surprised before. It's also a nice bonus when the extract batch overachieves, and you add an easy extract recipe to the playbook.

 

[GoodTruble]

Updating on two brew days...

Strawberry Blonde/ Extract Raspberry Saison

Kolsch / Extract Festbier

If anyone wants to know more recipe details, just message me.

Process-wise, I started setting the timer on my brewzilla to heat an initial 8 gallons of water to 210F before I wake up. I then mix 4 gallons of it in a separate side kettle with extract and any wort from overnight steeping. I then add 2-4 gallons of room temperature water into the remaining 4 gallons in the brewzilla, and that usually lands me pretty close to my desired strike temp to begin the all grain mash. I like the time saving of this approach because I have both brews well underway within 10-15 minutes. I can then add 1-3 gallons of all grain wort beer into the extract beer kettle after mash and boil, and have several options for hopping.