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| The dueling brew kettles Thanks again Marshall |
The other thing that Daniel’s quad brewday inspired me to do
was make a parti-gyle beer off of second runnings of Westbennetteren 12. I’d been wanting to do one since the parti-gyle episode of Brewing TV, in fact if it wasn’t for the reality of being plan out
of fermenter space I would have done a Damien inspired black ale off of the
second runnings from 33.
After talking to Daniel and reviewing his parti-gyle small
beer I was concerned that my second running gravity would be too small for what
I wanted. I therefore hatched a crazy
plan to add about 5.5lbs of additional grain to the mash tun and re-mash at 155
for about 30 minutes to see if I could boost it up. I decided that once the mash was done I would
take a pre-boil gravity reading and supplement with some DME to raise the OG target
to produce a beer in the 5-6% abv range.
In order to have any chance of doing this in a reasonable time frame I determined that I would need a second pot, burner and propane tank. This is where having a close circle of fellow brewers is great. I asked my buddy Marshall if I could borrow what I needed and he came through like a boss.
Going in I had already decided to use a second generation WLP670 American Farmhouse Blend strain that I had harvested from SNB can be CynicAle. I really want to make an IPA with the second runnings and had been toying around with using WLP670 for an IPA since BeanyTink’s Farmstead Ale was first brewed. All I needed to come up with was a nice IPA hop schedule, but to do that I need to know what my gravity would be.
Going in I had already decided to use a second generation WLP670 American Farmhouse Blend strain that I had harvested from SNB can be CynicAle. I really want to make an IPA with the second runnings and had been toying around with using WLP670 for an IPA since BeanyTink’s Farmstead Ale was first brewed. All I needed to come up with was a nice IPA hop schedule, but to do that I need to know what my gravity would be.
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| The 5.5lbs of additional grains |
My pre-boil gravity came in really low at 1.030 with an
estimate OG or 1.041 and abv of 3.8%. I
decided to add a pound of Golden Light DME and a little over a pound and a half
(1lb 10oz) of Pilsen DME to bump the pre-boil gravity to 1.046 and targeted OG to
1.063. Once I was happy with my targeted
gravity it was time to add the hops After having recently played around with a Melrose IPA recipe I’d found online, I decided that I
would use that hop schedule and bitterness ratio (1.436 IBU/SG). This was a simple trick of scaling down the
recipe while adjusting the OG and hop schedule to keep everything in
alignment.
This is why I was frustrated when the post-boil gravity came
in at 1.055 – 8 points under target. I
put a lot of thought into building this on the fly recipe based around the
pre-boil gravity measurement. I think
there is an error somewhere in calculations that BeerSmith 2 is giving me. I willing to bet that it has something to do
with my equipment setting as I noticed it worsen when I changed from Brew Pot
(15 Gal) and Igloo/Gott Cooler (10 Gal) to the SNB Brewhouse (Keggle and
Cooler) setup. I’ll have to play around
with it more by returning to the old setting on my next brew.
Cheers
- SNB
