For the past few years, I have been doing a style of brewing called "parti-gyle". It's actually a very traditional technique which was largely lost during the industrial age. Basically, you use a single batch of grain and produce three different beers--one very strong, one medium and one weak. You do this by sparging three times. If you know what sparging is, please skip the next paragraph.
When brewing beer from malted grain, the steps, very simply, work like this. First, you mix the grain with relatively warm water which causes the starches to be converted to sugars. Second, you rinse the grain with more water and collect the sugars as they get washed from the grain. This step is called sparging. The water and sugar collected from sparging the grain is called wort. It is then boiled, cooled, and fermented to make beer.
If you've brewed an all-grain stout, and tasted the grain after you have sparged, you know that it tastes sweet. Parti-gyle brewing allows you to take advantage of this and produce a lighter beer by doing a second and even a third sparge. In the picture below, you will see three fermenters from my latest parti-gyle batch. I brewed (from right to left) an imperial stout (original gravity of 1.094), a porter (OG = 1.072) and a brown ale (OG = 1.033) from the same grain. The initial fermentation of the stout was so intense that I had to attach a blow-off tube even though my fermenter is a 7 gallon fermenter with 5.5 gallons of beer in it. The brown is ready to move to the secondary fermenter and the porter probably will be tomorrow.
I really enjoy the challenge of creating recipes that give me three distincty different beers from one batch of grain.
The recipe for this batch:
33 lbs British 2-row pale malt
0.5 lbs wheat malt
2 lbs 120 L Crystal
2 lbs roast Barley
0.75 lbs Choc. Malt
1 lb Black Patent Malt
Initial mash temp = 158 F
Hops:
Beer 1:
60 min = 3 oz Chinook
5 min = 1 oz Northern Brewer
Beer 2
60 min = 1.5 oz Chinook
5 min = 1 oz N. Brewer
Beer 3
60 min = 0.5 oz Chinook
5 min = 0.5 oz N. Brewer
Yeast = Wyeast London Ale
