Recreating the complete Young's parti-gyle

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Colindo

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Hi everyone,

ever since Ron Pattinson published his Young's recipes and mentioned that in 2006, Ordinary, Special and Ram Rod were still parti-gyled I wanted to recreate this. I have experience with Fuller's parti-gyle, following the brewlogs that were published in this forum. Young's parti-gyle seem to have been quite a bit more complicated though, so I thought it made sense to have a bit of a discussion here.
These are Ron's posts:
https://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2024/03/lets-brew-wednesday-2006-youngs-ordinary.html
https://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2024/03/lets-brew-2006-youngs-special.html
https://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2024/03/lets-brew-wednesdauy-2006-youngs-ram-rod.html

After reading those I had many open questions, such as which hop varieties were actually added and at what time. The IBU are much lower than stated in the Real Ale Almanac of 1992, which I have. Also the crystal malt seems strangely pale. So I asked John Hatch, former Young's brewer and manager of the heritage site in the Ram quarter, if he could send me a photo of the page and answer my questions.
Young's Parti Gyle Brewlog.jpg
His answers:
  • In the hops section of the page you can see that the Goldings we used were T.G. Redsell and the Fuggles were P. Highmoor. The ratio of Goldings to Fuggles was usually 2:1 but, as we were running down the hop stocks before closing the brewery, Derek must have adjusted the ratio such that both hops would run out at the same time.
  • The Late copper Goldings, added at the last 10 min of the boil, were also Redsell.
  • The hop rates are 2.6 lb/Qtr for the Copper hops and 1.15 lb/Qtr Late Copper hops.
  • The total alpha used is 37.81 lb out of 629 lb of total hops used. This would make the average alpha about 6% which does sound surprisingly high for Goldings & Fuggles. However, I have checked back and the alpha of the Redsell was 5.85% and the Highmoor was 6.2%
  • Dry hopping of RR and SPA was carried out in conditioning tank as far as I can remember but I do not have those particular rates available (sorry for the omission).
  • Young’s only used Crystal 150 as far as I remember, Ron may have mis-read someone’s poor handwriting.
  • We used to get bulk Crystal 150 from a number of suppliers, but it looks like the batch used in 2006 was from Baird.
  • Finally, the pitching rates for the three beers can be seen in the yeast section on the attached, all in litres of yeast (balm) per Brl. The SPA was 1.4, the RR was 1.6 and the PA was 1.2.
So, my plan is to go through the brewlog in the next few weeks and try to work out what a good clone recipe could look like. I will probably start by chucking all numbers into a spreadsheet and converting to hectolitre and kg. Not only would that help me, being from Germany, but also it would make a comparison with Fuller's easier.

The missing data for the IBUs and the dry-hops is what I'll take from the Real Ale Almanac:
All beers have 30-34 IBU, all hops are whole hops, Special was dry-hopped with Target and Ram Rod was dry-hopped with Goldings.
 
Good stuff.
  • In the hops section of the page you can see that the Goldings we used were T.G. Redsell and the Fuggles were P. Highmoor.
I'd assume it's Highwood, not Highmoor - like Tony Redsell, Stuart Highwood is one of the doyens of Kent hopgrowing, at Crowplain Farm in the Weald between Tonbridge and Maidstone, although the company name is Peter Highwood.
 
@Northern_Brewer I didn't read it as "moor" either. "Highwood" is probably correct. I have to say the handwriting is not the best, though.

This is my table so far.
Grain bill
Qrs​
kg​
%​
Maris Otter​
154​
23440​
96.25​
Hecto litres per barrel​
Crystal 150​
6​
913​
3.75​
1.63584​
160​
24353​
Hops
lbs​
kg​
Golding​
145​
66​
Fuggle​
291​
132​
Golding (late)​
193​
87​
Water
bbl​
hL​
L per kg malt​
°F​
°C​
Mash​
346​
566​
2.32​
152​
67​
Underlet​
30​
49​
0.20​
165​
74​
Sparge​
645​
1055​
4.33​
147​
64​
lbs​
g/L​
Gypsum
101​
0,27​
Yeast
L/bbl​
L/hL​
SG​
°P​
Ordinary​
1.2​
0.73​
1.0368​
9,2​
Special​
1.4​
0.85​
1.0448​
11.2​
Ram Rod​
1.6​
0.98​
1.0528​
13.2​

I can already compare with Fuller's that the mash thickness after the underlet is the same 2.5L/kg, but Fuller's do a longer sparge with 4.9L/kg vs Young's 4.3L/kg.
 
The brew will happen on Sunday. Very excited already. The yeast seems to be doing fine, I have a starter running since New Year's eve.

I got some last info from John Hatch. First I asked about the "boil" section and apparently Young's would have some plain water under "Liq." already in the copper and top it up with wort to reach the "Brls in" quantity. Wild!
Regarding water adjustment, there was some CaCl in the Hot Liquor tank (0.18 pint per bbl) and the water was also treated with "some" sulfuric acid additionally to the gypsum I noted above. I'll have to do some guesswork for that.

So, yeah. Quite looking forward to brewing this!
 
This is the recipe I went for:

14L, OG 11.2°P / 1.045, 15 EBC / 7 SRM, 30-34 IBU

Grain
96,25% Maris Otter
3,75% Crystal 150
I went with 3kg of grain which ended up giving a pretty good hit on all data. My Crystal 150 was from Paul's malting. I mashed for 1h at 66°C / 150°F.

Water
1737228812418.png

This is the water profile I got using the local London tap water and adding an amount of sulfuric acid that I thought made sense. The mash pH with this water would be 5.4. My own water profile looks slightly different because I have more magnesium and sodium in my water, but I made sure the rest was the same.
I used 7.5L or mash liquor and 13L of sparge liquor. For my own water treatment I used lactic acid and got the high sulfate content via gypsum.

Gyles
I expected to get the following gyles: 2x 7L with 14°P and 7°P after boiling, based on previous experiments. I prepared two hopping calculator entries based on that and adjusted them slightly when the final data was measured.

1st hop boil
Boil time: 70 minutes, measured volume after boil: 7L, measured gravity: 15°P, time spent above 80°C during cooling: 2 minutes.
Fuggle 2%aa, whole cones, 70 minutes, 20g
Challenger 6%aa, pellets, 70 minutes, 10g
Goldings 5%aa, pellets, 10 minutes, 6g

2nd hop boil
Boil time: 70 minutes, measured volume after boil: 8L, measured gravity: 7.5°P, time spent above 80°C during cooling: 3 minutes.
Fuggle 2%aa, whole cones, 70 minutes, 12g
Challenger 6%aa, pellets, 70 minutes, 6g
Goldings 5%aa, pellets, 10 minutes, 6g

I had Fuggle cones with a ridiculously low alpha (from a shop that does not specify alpha acids on their product page, thank you very much) so my thought was to mix this with Challenger to get a mixture that prevents me from drowning in hop cones. For the aroma addition I had the choice of either pellet Goldings or cones, but I left the cones package sealed for another day. Use as you like. Young's use 0.5g/l of Goldings for their late addition but since I know now that not only alpha acids but also aroma utilization is better in commercial breweries that for home brewer's I upped the value to around 0.75g/l.

For the IBU levels it is actually quite easy because all beers have 30-34 IBUs, so both gyles need to have the same values, so they can be calculated individually. Much easier than with Fuller's.

Blending
Things worked out so that I could go for an exact 1:3, 1:1 or 3:1 respectively for all beers. I ended up with 4L of Ordinary, 6.9L of Special and 4L of Ram Rod. In the end I got almost 15L from the 3kg of grain, a good amount.
The calculated colours I got are 13, 15 and 18 EBC for the three beers, a bit less than what Young's did in the record. For the Ram Rod they added colour, so I chose to do the same and added 5 EBC via a brewer's caramel with 3000 EBC that I got from a Dutch brewery shop. I calculated the amount of caramel I need by seeing that I need to dilute it by a factor of 600, so for 4L that would be 6.7ml.

Yeast
While the Wyeast 1768 starter had worked decently, I did not have that much yeast. I kept scooping up the krausen from the starter to get only the happy and flocculant yeast cells from my very old culture and added that to another starter. In the end, I did not have enough, so I added it to the 6.9L of Special, waited for a thick krauusen in the morning and spooned some of that into the other fermenters. In the end that worked like a breeze and I had solid kraeusen on all vessels within 24h. Lucky me.
I pitched at 18°C and let it rise to 20-21°C freely.

I was ill for a week, so I still need to do the dry hop once I harvested some of the yeast. Hopefully tomorrow. The dry-hop I chose would be 1g/l, Target for the Special and Goldings for the Ram Rod.
 
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