Finally! (Parti Gyle Complete)

In true Medius Nox Noctis form, I finished my parti gyle brew in the wee hours of the morning...

First of all, it is a crazy brewer who tries to brew multiple all-grain batches in one day. The brewer who thinks they can do three should not roam the streets of his free will. I will never do that again (even if my wife would let me)!

Besides time, the biggest challenge I faced with my parti gyle brew day involved brewing software. I do own BeerTools Pro, but I am usually too lazy to use it; maybe there is parti gyle formulation capability built into the software, but I wouldn't know. I primarily use the BeerTools.com website for my recipe formulation. It is not as robust or flexible as the BeerTools Pro standalone software, but it is quick and gets me in the ballpark for all my recipes; plus I am a "Gold" member, so I can store up to 256 recipes online.

The online recipe calculator has no parti gyle flexibility - or much in the way of sparge adjustments at all. It simply takes your grain bill and your recipe volumes and calculates out your gravities. This works great for the average batch or fly-sparged recipe. But for no-sparge or parti gyle? Not so much.

At any rate, I ended up pretty close to the predictions on the first batch (the Old Ale), which came in just over 1.100 OG with 5.5 gallons into the carboy. For the second beer, a Northern English Brown, I could not figure out how to make the adjustments in the interface to calculate the second runnings separately... I ended up just plugging in a completely new recipe, preserving the grain bill ratios and hop additions, but scaling it down to the actual gravity I pulled into the kettle.

I used some interesting yeast strains (Wyeast Old Ale Blend for the Old Ale, and Wyeast West Yorkshire Ale for the Northern English Brown) this time around. The Old Ale, dubbed 'The Reaper', will actually get racked into a secondary to let the Brettanomyces do its work; it will eventually go into bottles as part of my gift beer for the Holidays at the end of 2011. The Northern English Brown ('The Creeper') will be ready much sooner, and I can't wait to pull some pints off draft in a few weeks!