Parti-Gyle Brewing

jceg316 said:

I've tried partigyle brewing before. It was a great experience and I really like the idea of it. It takes some effort though. I've only tried it once and made many mistakes: http://www.honestbeerguide.com/homebrew-log/partigyle-brewing/ mostly getting my water volumes wrong.

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Wow yeah a lot of water for what you ended up with, but as you say with the SG's you could have got another beer if you had the time.

I probably use less than 20L of water.
I usually end up with an 8L batch for the main brews of around 1040 - 1050 and end up after the partigyle with another 5-6 litres of around 1010-1020

Slid said:

Yes indeed, thanks to Brew Mate. Of the 1.054 OG I believe 20 gravity points is the kit and 34 is the second runnings. I "only" took about 12L for the Barley Wine and it simmered down to 10L in the FV. So, without the kit it may have made for a 3.5% ABV sort of a brew.

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Brilliant, that would be a serviceable session beer without the extra DME

Ajhutch said:

Brilliant, that would be a serviceable session beer without the extra DME

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Yes, indeed it would. That is exactly my thinking also.

If I were to do this again (and already I have at least two plans) either another Tesco / Wilko kit sale or some cheap DME seems in order.

The two beers have really kicked off fermenting and had I just given the mash some more attention, it would have gone very well indeed and added at most an hour to the brew day.

Slid said:

Yes, indeed it would. That is exactly my thinking also.

If I were to do this again (and already I have at least two plans) either another Tesco / Wilko kit sale or some cheap DME seems in order.

The two beers have really kicked off fermenting and had I just given the mash some more attention, it would have gone very well indeed and added at most an hour to the brew day.

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Onwards and upwards! 'At least two more plans' - we home brewers dont know when to stop do we

Ajhutch said:

Onwards and upwards! 'At least two more plans' - we home brewers dont know when to stop do we

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Nope. In the 15 minutes since the last post, I got given access to five more cheap one can kits for £30.50, courtesy of the Tesco sale. Just can't resist. Short date? No worries. Partial Mash brews were all good. Getting half as much again and more from a brewday for such a trivial outlay sound good to me.

David Heath has a great video of split wort brewing. Similar concept but a bit easier. Best of luck sounds like a good plan you have.

Slid said:

Very good looking blog, there!

After the first runnings, I assume you returned the total volume back up to 33L, as opposed to adding a full 33 further litres? In that, 20L in the fermenters from 66L of water in total seems profligate, even by the leakage performance of a water company.

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Thanks! It was a while ago now, but I think I must have added a further 33L. I don't think any wort was stuck, I think there was just a huge absorption factor, along with not using enough water to sparge.

As mentioned I'd fly sparge as normal and split into different buckets, each one for a different beer. It's quite a lot of work once the beer splits so if you can have help I'd advise using it. Another option is to keep one lot of wort in a sterilised and sealed container and boil it another time.

I used a 2.4KW element on 15L of wort. That power is used to heat 25L+, so my boil off rate was way higher than it normally would be, meaning my losses were even more.

So, a progress update.

The small Barley Wine batch is sitting at 9.5L post racking and has dropped from 1.085 to 1.012. A tad harsh tasting, but promising!

The Cascade Partial Mash brew was bottled today. 46 500ml bottles at 1.009, down from 1.053. This tasted very good - pleasant aroma as well.

I must say that at this stage, I am quite pleased with this, given the issues I had with the dough-in, the mash and the sparge.

Very interesting thread and subject. I have been thinking about making a barley wine for next Xmas and a Pale Ale from the 2nd runnings. I always combine the 2, normally use 21 litre first and around 15 for the next run. Would be a lot of fun to boil them separately. Wil US05 be ok for a 9% beer?
What sort of efficiency would you need to use for calculating the first run off OG?

BeerCat said:

Very interesting thread and subject. I have been thinking about making a barley wine for next Xmas and a Pale Ale from the 2nd runnings. I always combine the 2, normally use 21 litre first and around 15 for the next run. Would be a lot of fun to boil them separately. Wil US05 be ok for a 9% beer?
What sort of efficiency would you need to use for calculating the first run off OG?

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The yeast in the BW @ 9.7% is a mixture of US 05 and English Ale yeast WLP 002, so US 05 is going to be good @ 9%, I would suggest.

The efficiency on the first runnings is probably not critical, since you are pinching the "best" of the wort, in that respect. I expect I got fairly poor efficiency on the first runnings as the mash was very thick and I did not stir it up enough.

12L of first wort to get to 9.5L post first racking really is going to ruin any hopes Brew- House efficiency wise, I guess.

Well, tonight I had a couple of bottles of the Cascade second runnings plus Coopers kit beer.

It has 100g of Cascade in it, plus the bitterings from the kit, which makes the hops back end loaded.

It is great. I have done quite a few small mash plus kit partial mash brews, and this is a bit better than them.

So - Parti-gyle can be a major faff, but, as often, you get beer that is truly great.

No tasting updates on the Barley Wine - there are 12 x 500ml in swing top bottles as a designated Xmas beer. Some other bottles that will be messed around with, in quasi scientific style in due course.

I am toying with the idea of doing another of these. Andy Hamilton's Brewing Britain has a recipe for circa 10L of Barley Wine and 19L of a Milk Stout. I Googled Grainfather Parti-gyle brewing earlier today and guess what pick #3 was? Yeah, this thread. I know Google goes on previous preferences, but I ain't even an expert in my own house.

I don't have any malt extract knocking around, so a shorter second runnings beer could be an option. I now have a 10L Carboy that holds about 11L to the neck so I will age the BW in that for a good while.
The main issue I had last time was with sticky mashes, but I think I know a bit more about the equipment and how to get better efficiencies now. Other thinking is that if I need to blend in some second runnings beer to get to the 11L capacity, so what? Even 15-20% darker beer in a Barley Wine / Old Ale sort of a beer won't make much difference.

Another pointer I picked up today is that it is feasible to do the two boils roughly concurrently outside the GF and then use the GF for chilling. As most of my recent GF brews have cut out during the heating- to-boiling phase, this might fit in paradoxically well with my enforced new methodology of baling wort from one container to another, straining stuff out in a BIAB bag as I go...

I could do a "capping" addition to the first grain bill, possibly using dark malts steeped in the oven. Oven mashing / steeping was something I did on almost all my Partial Mash brews using a one can kit plus a half length, stove-top AG brew.

I am torn between mashing-out the whole main grain bill at 75C, before taking the first runnings (AH suggests 71C), or taking the first runnings at mash temperatures of say, 63C, and adding replacement water for a second, short "mash" period with the steeped grain "capping" the main grain bill.

Here are the two elements of the grain bill:

Maris Otter 6.5kg, Crystal 0,5kg, for the main mash.
Black Malt 300g Roast Barley 100g, Chocolate 200g and Crystal 200g for the "cap".

I expect to add up to 500g of sugar - maybe dark, unrefined sugar to the Dark Beer and home-made Golden Syrup to the BW.

Hops will be a neutral bittering hop (Warrior / Admiral) and some English style hop for later addition(s) - maybe Goldings, Endeavour, or some other things I bought whilst tipsy, because they were cheap.

So, any comments or suggestions would be most welcome, as ever :hat:.

I really need to pluck up the courage and time to do this myself.

If you're happy with a more fermentable wort then skipping the mash out will probably help the second beer but with just roast and crystal malts you'd probably be fine doing the 75c mash out then capping the mash.

Blending some stout into the barleywine should be fine and a nice extra touch. When I did all the maths for one a while back it was a Wee Heavy and a Sweet Stout, blending would have helped hit the right colour for the Wee Heavy.

Would you blend before or after boiling? After might be easier as then you can start boiling the strong beer while you mash the weaker but before gives better options for hopping.

Zephyr259 said:

I really need to pluck up the courage and time to do this myself.

If you're happy with a more fermentable wort then skipping the mash out will probably help the second beer but with just roast and crystal malts you'd probably be fine doing the 75c mash out then capping the mash.

Blending some stout into the barleywine should be fine and a nice extra touch. When I did all the maths for one a while back it was a Wee Heavy and a Sweet Stout, blending would have helped hit the right colour for the Wee Heavy.

Would you blend before or after boiling? After might be easier as then you can start boiling the strong beer while you mash the weaker but before gives better options for hopping.

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I always rack beers after 2 wks in primary and then bottle after a further week. So all I would do for the "blending" is put all the first runnings beer from the secondary FV in the Carboy and top it up out of the tap on the secondary FV used for the second runnings beer and then bottle the remainder of the second runnings beer.

Simonh82 said:

Fuller's still use this method to make their beers today. It was used by quite a lot of breweries up to the middle decades of the 20th century.

I'm guessing industrialised process efficiency modeling did for it as the large breweries mechanised and automated.

It's never appealed to me, partly because I don't fancy handling 8KG of wet grain. The odd 6KG grain bill has been big enough for me and my 30L BIAB set up.

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A good run through of Fullers process from John Keeling, here.

https://beerandbrewing.com/practical-parti-gyle-brewing/

Slid said:

I always rack beers after 2 wks in primary and then bottle after a further week. So all I would do for the "blending" is put all the first runnings beer from the secondary FV in the Carboy and top it up out of the tap on the secondary FV used for the second runnings beer and then bottle the remainder of the second runnings beer.

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Ah, so you'd blend the final beers, cool. Some articles suggest blending the worts as the weak beer can be a bit thin on it's own, guess capping would help with that.

Today was the day! I am taking the last of the previous year's leave over Easter, so had the house to myself today for just long enough to do this second Parti-gyle.
In the FV's I have a Barley Wine at 1.075 for 10L, to which I am planning to add homemade Golden syrup on the fourth day (Monday) which contains around 500g of cane sugar.
Also a Stout at 1.061 and 27L. This had 1kg of DME added as well as the 500g of Dark Sugar.

Otherwise, the recipes are very much as outlined above and the yeast is a re-used US05. Both had 25g Warrior / Admiral 14.5% or so Alphas and 25g EKG towards the end.

After watching @David_Heath videos in the meantime, since the last Parti-gyle,I got much better efficiencies today. More like the usual 75%, maybe even slightly more. This was by mashing in for 35 mins altogether, then doing a big stir up at 30 mins on the first mash.
Another good move was doing the addition of water, post the pump out of 12L for the BW, as an underletting. This just means sticking a funnel in the central overflow pipe and pouring 12L of water down it. This made getting the second mash going properly very easy.
Last trick was to cold steep the dark grains of 800g or so in 2.5L of water overnight. I heated the mixture up to about 70C on the stove and strained the grains using a nylon paint strainer bag for part of the "top-up" water and then dunk sparged the dark grains in both the top-up water and the sparge water for the main mash. A lot of to-ing and fro-ing this entailed, but it did mean that I never had more than 7kg in the actual grain basket.

The plan of doing both boils outside the GF, and using it for just the mashing and cooling, went a bit astray when I had an issue with the power supply in the PECO boiler. Had to do the last bit of the boil on the Stout in the GF. That was today's only glitch!

From mash in to finishing the clean-up afterwards was just under 7 hours, which was about as expected.
I did spend (waste?) hours thinking about how to do these brews, so was delighted the moment the second airlock was fitted.

Zephyr259 said:

Ah, so you'd blend the final beers, cool. Some articles suggest blending the worts as the weak beer can be a bit thin on it's own, guess capping would help with that.

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I went out to the LHBS in the meantime and bought 2x500g of DME. It seems to be a bit stronger looking, at 1.061 OG, than I expected, but I really was not anticipating BHE at 77-80% overall for such a large amount of grain in the GF (7kg).

I expect to add a fair amount to the BW to fill the 10L Carboy, as it holds nearer 11L to the neck and I don't want to leave any air in it.

I was very interested to read about party-gyling. I found an interesting description of it here . I wish I were closer to London, would love to visit the brewery and the pub mentioned!

Slid said:

I went out to the LHBS in the meantime and bought 2x500g of DME. It seems to be a bit stronger looking, at 1.061 OG, than I expected, but I really was not anticipating BHE at 77-80% overall for such a large amount of grain in the GF (7kg).

I expect to add a fair amount to the BW to fill the 10L Carboy, as it holds nearer 11L to the neck and I don't want to leave any air in it.

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Yeah, you should get good efficiency on a brew like this because you got 37 L of beer from the 7 kg. The efficiency hit is when you only brew 23 L so the sparge is really small. Guess your mash was about 22 L, so after draining the 12 L for the barleywine you essentially sparged with 20 L as I'm guessing you had about 30L pre-boil for the 27L of stout?

Am I reading it right? You mashed and drew off 12 L of first runnings, then added 12L back in as an underlet, the I presume you left that for a while then lifted the grain and sparged?

What were your pre-boil SGs and volumes if you have them? Also do you know the stout SG before you added the sugar and DME? I'll probably just bite the bullet and do one of these "blind" and see what happens but extra data for what to expect always helps. It's why I tend to take and SG of the mash before sparging too.