Partigyle Experiment

A few of us in the Snake River Brewers crew wanted to do an experimental brew to celebrate Nov. 11, 2011 (11/11/11). So what us geniuses decided to do was a recipe that had an OG at least 1.111 with 111 IBUs. We'll all age the beers a year and taste/judge them on 12/12/12. Cool concept, huh? I thought so too, but was somewhat horrified at the potential of brewing up 5-10 gallons of a pretty expensive beer that might end up tasting only slightly better than river sludge... So what to do?

To limit the potential damage, I decided to try my hand at partigyle brewing. It involves doing a single mash, but collecting the multiple "runnings" from the mash tun to make multiple beers of different strengths. This was a standard practice back in colonial times, where brewers would make a "strong beer" from the first runnings, a "table beer" from the second, and a "small (or children's) beer" from the third. I'm an all-grain brewer that uses fly sparging so hard could it be, right?

The recipe I used was based on Terrapin's Wake 'n Bake Oatmeal Coffee Stout, which is a strong american stout. I ramped up the recipe to make sure I could get ~2 gals of a 1.111 beer out of the first runnings and 6 gallons of a ~1.080 stout out of the second. Anything left over after that would be a bonus. I ended up hitting my targets on the first 2 batches with 4 gal of a 1.032 mild left over. Looking back, I could have made 10 gallons of a 1.060 stout but really wanted the "middle" beer to resemble the Wake 'n Bake. The brew day went very well but was long, since I ended doing 3 separate 1-hour boils.

At this point, all three are either kegged or bottled. The 1.111 will be cold-conditioned in a keg for a long time. The middle beer was racked to a secondary and had 4 oz of roughly ground, dark roasted Ethiopian coffee from High Desert Coffee Company in Mountain Home, ID (thanks, Jim!) added for 4 days. It tastes absolutely delicious! The Mild was bottled shortly after the primary. It ended up at 1.008 so it should be an easy drinking light brown ale at about 3.2% ABV. Samples I tasted so far have been promising, with a nice roasty nose, light body, and dry finish.

Prost!!