New way to split a batch?

Señor Brew™ has been thinking; I know, this is dangerous.  But as those loyal readers of this blog (I think we're up to 30 now) know, Señor Brew™ likes to get the maximum amount of variety out of his short amount of brewing time.  Partigyle brewing, and splitting a batch among yeasts is one way to this.

But what if you were to boil a batch of beer, say for an hour, draw off a part of it, chill it and get it in the fermenters while you're still boiling the rest of it, maybe adding extra hops to finish it out. The second beer would be more bitter, with more concentrated flavor, and a higher alcohol content due to the longer boil. It would be fairly pronounced, because with the removal of a portion of the volume for the first beer, the remainder would have a lower volume to surface area, and evaporation rates would go up. Plus while the total amount of chilling time would be about the same, each portion would chill rather quickly, and the first part would be chillin' while the second part be boilin' (A reggae song just came while Señor Brew was finishing this sentence).


I'm thinking that this would work for a pale ale/IPA, bock/doppelbock, etc.


What do you think, Brewbuds? Has anybody tried this? Pros, cons, ex-cons?

There's a Party in my Gyle! (3 beers in 1)

On August 12th  Señor Brew™  finally had some time to get a brewday together.  To make efficient use of that time, he decided to make 3 beers out of one mash, one strong beer (you could call it a barleywine), and two medium ones, an Oktoberfest and what he likes to call PseudOfest.

He did this by using different runnings from the mash to brew the different beers.  This is known as parti-gyle brewing, as Randy Mosher, author of Radical Brewing and Tasting Beer, describes so well in the linked article.

The whole point of the brewday was to have an Oktoberfest ready by at least the second weekend of the official Oktoberfest festival, which happens to coincide with Senor Brew's birthday.  Since  Señor Brew™  is out of his award winning barleywine, he thought it would be a good idea to have a strong beer on hand as well.  Of  course an Oktoberfest, being a lager, needs extra time to ferment, and even a longer time to lager to give it that smooth lager finish.  And a barleywine should be aged for many months to really mature into it's flavor profile.   Señor Brew™  can be impatient, so he decided to split the later runnings, post-boil into two different carboys, one with the Oktoberfest yeast, for the Oktoberfest, and one with an ale yeast that would be ready much sooner, the PseudOfest, which is already kegged and delightfully quaffable.  The first runnings  of course were used for the barleywine.

The brewday actually went quite smoothly, unlike most where at least something seems to go wrong.   Señor Brew™  had his old propane turkey fryer burner going to boil 3 gallons of wort for the barleywine, while at the same time, the big natural gas burner was used to boil about another 9 gallons of wort for the O'fest and PseudOfest.

I've exported the recipes for the Oktoberfest and Barleywine from my brew app into separate posts, Barleywine and Oktoberfest.  (Hey I've got to hit my quota to average at least one post per week through the end of the year somehow.) The efficiency is set very low to reflect that only part of the sugars from the mash were used in each brew.  The total efficiency would have been in  Señor Brew™ 's normal range for his setup.  Purists will note a couple things--one, the barleywine's grain bill is not typical, but this is because it was an after thought to the Oktoberfest, which the grain bill is more appropriate for.  I'm going to call it German Barleywine, due to the Munich and Vienna malts.  Also, there was no decoction mash for the Oktoberfest, just a single infusion with some melanoiden malt thrown in to approximate one, even though those same purists will say it's a poor substitute.  Señor Brew™  doesn't care, it makes a fine tasty Oktoberfest.

Señor Brew™ also got a little kooky with an extra ingredient.  We had a package of wheat pasta in Casa del Brew™  lying around, which was not likely to be consumed-- Señora Brew™  is gluten intolerant, and  Señor Brew™  saves his daily carbohydrate allocation for homebrew.  So we grind it up, and into the mash it goes!  There's no entry for it in the brew app I use, so it got listed as wheat DME (dry malt extract).  Close enough for homebrew.

Finally the PseudOfest recipe is not included, because it would be redundant.  Just substitute your favorite fast fermenting ale yeast for the Oktoberfest, ferment warmer (upper 60s to low 70s), and let her rip!  No need to lager it either.