I am doing a partygyle today and had a water question. I do not want to sparge at all. Just pull the first runnings and boil. I need about 6.5 gallons of wort because I expect a loss of about 1.5g during boil. How much strike water do I need? And is there a calculator online? (Couldn’t find one) I have 13.5 gallons grain and am using table sugar to bring up my gravity. Normally I would mash in with 4.5 gallons for this amount of grain.
Thanks for the help.
To get 6.5 gallons wort on a no sparge:
13.5 lbs * Absorption Rate (gal/lb) = Absorption (gal)
6.5 gal + 1.5 gal + Absorption (gal) + MLT Deadspace (gal) + Kettle Deadspace (gal) = ~ Strike Volume (gal)
Then you need to check if you can mash that much!
Ok. But how do I get absorption gal, melt dead space and kettle dead space.
I’m sure My mash fun can hold the required water.
You measure it. Or guess, but those should be values you have tracked for your equipment.
No. I just brew and I’ve done it enough that I know how to get the right volume after sparring. But. I did find a .125 gal per pound absorption recommendation. So I guess I’m going with 9.5gs and I’ll just find out the hard/easy way of trial and error.
For No-Sparge you’ll need to know those values to hit the numbers you want. If you want to finish at 6.5 gal, you should measure your deadspace just to be sure. Fill your mash tun and kettle and see how much liquid is left when you drain the water out. Add those values to your 9.5 gal.
This would be the ideal batch to measure for those things.
My mash kettle and lauter tun both have zero dead space, so I have a pretty good idea of my absorption rate: I find it’s about 0.18 gal/lbs, but that 0.125 might be quite realistic too. It will vary with the particular grain and especially the crush. If you can actually measure your dead space, assume 0.125 for absorption, and check that against your actual result, you’ll then know by the difference the actual absorption rate and be all calibrated for the future.
I use 0.1 gal/lb for absorption in my calculations, and it seems pretty spot on.
I always collect 7 gallons pre-boil, and I no sparge, so I just add .1 g/lb to 7 gallons and that’s my total water.
I then subtract 2.5 gallons from that figure, and that’s my first infusion volume. The remaining 2.5 gallons is brought to a boil during the first rest and used to bring the mash temp up from 148° to 162-3°.
Simple, but it works well on my system.
My figure is probably artificially high, because I fly sparge and stop the runoff when it gets turbid. That 0.125 is probably a good guess on average, but this highlights the need to dial in your own system.
That equation went way over my head. So. I’m just gonna guesstimate. 8.25 gallons if it’s high I’m doing a second runnings. Low, I’ll sparge, just a little. I figure after this test I’ll get some good insight for future partygyles.
One day. One day. I will dial in my system. But I’m also thinking of a new mashtun in my future. So. It’s not gonna be today.
Ima try something like this next.
Well. It worked out. I prob had a gallon too much, but next time I’ll take that into consideration. For those who have done the partigyle, do your second runnings come out way lighter in color? My second runnings are super light. I mashed it about 45 mins too. Extended my brew day a solid hour. But. Worth the extra 5 gallons.
Prost.
Yeah, never done that, but when I sparge, I can always tell the transition from first wort to sparge by the instantaneous change in color! Pretty drastic.
And just because it itches my inner pedant… that’s not parti gyle. I’m sure there’s a name for it, can’t think. But parti gyle means split (parti) wort or batch (a gyle is a single brew.) It is a single, normal brew, mashed, sparged, boiled with hops and chilled, then split between two or more fermenters. Before yeast is pitched, one or more fermenters are diluted with water to make beers of different strengths, but identical in flavor balance. Sorry, I feel better now. 
Sounds like you had a great brew day; one extra hour for one extra batch is practically free beer!
I know right. Hadn’t brewed in a while. Hit the ground running. Now I have something to baby and then drink.
I did run out of hops. But. I just put the hops from the first batch, that were in my spider, into the second batch. Who knows what will happen! I like it.
Experimental brewing! Cool. It plays into the theme of a free batch of beer: reuse the malt, reuse the hops… be sure to report the results! (I know reusing late hops from one brew as bittering in the next was done up to the early 20th century, just never knew of anyone actually trying it…)
Partigyle is what the OP first described. From and article in BYO:
“To start with a cliché, parti-gyle brewing is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Originally, it wasn’t actually a trick, but an inherent procedure in old brewing methods. The traditional approach was to conduct separate mashes on a given parcel of grain. The first wort would be completely run off, then the grain re-mashed with hot water and the second wort completely run off, and so on for a third, and even sometimes a fourth mash.”
https://byo.com/article/parti-gyle-brewing-techniques/
Brewers will often add some amount of an additional grain to the second mash to increase color or just add some more fermentables to the second beer.
What you described is splitting a batch and many people do that too. It’s useful to compare yeast strains or add other ingredients for diversity or experimentation.
Paul
To quote Ron Pattinson, "Forget what you think you know about parti-gyling. The method employed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries isn’t what you’ll find described in home brewing books. " Yes, what the OP describes is what homebrewers have long called parti gyle. But it’s not the commercial British practice of that name. Something like the homebrew practice goes back a long way. Before the introduction of sparging, brewers would sometimes run off the wort and proceed to boil and ferment it, “cap” the mash with around 10% fresh malt, reflood the tun, rest, and run off a smaller wort. More than once, maybe. This was never called “parti gyle,” and the practice was abandoned after the 18th century, as sparging took hold. The practice of sparging originated in Scotland and was adopted in England from the 1850s. This led eventually to the practice of parti gyle as I describe it, a far more efficient brewing system, which is still in commercial use today. You can look at old brewing books like The London and Country Brewer for variations on the older systems of multiple mashes, each producing a separately hopped and boiled wort, and Ron Pattinson (and later manuals) on “modern” parti gyle methods. Still, the proper distinction is between “parti gyle,” literally meaning “split batch,” and “multiple mashes.” Because I’m being pedantic. And it helps to have a common language for discussion.
The first batch was a bit Amber in color. At least when the beer has a volume like in the carboy. The second batch was like pale yellow, I can actually see through the carboy while it’s fermenting.
But yes basically free beer. I bought an extra yeast pack and a pack of hops so. What’s $15 for an extra hour of time.
It’s adtually really interesting watching the two ferment side by side. Hey are different yeast strains and behave completely different. One the krausen grew upward and blew out (the big beer). The smaller beer, it’s like he Krausen gren downward and didn’t blow anything off.
So I don’t know why that is, if it has to do with the yeast, or the sugars. But I added two#s sugar to both batches.
Update
The first running is still very active and has a fair amount of movement in the carboy. It blew off a solid gallon of liquid volume.
The second running is completely clear/transparent and finished in about 4 days. It did not blow anything off. Both are more similar in color than before. But at this moment the first running is probably going to be a three week fermentation. I’ll probbaly bottle the first running and keg the second.
More to come after I get some tasting notes.
I don’t know if this adds anything to the discussion but I ran across the following while trying to figure out a partigyle not long ago. I wasn’t concerned at all with the second runnings… that one could be whatever it ended up being but I did want to hit a certain target OG for the first runnings to make a barleywine. It worked out quite well…
[quote]If you want to do a 50/50 split Partigyle take the decimal part of the strongest beer’s OG and divide by 2. Then subtract that from the OG. Let’s say you want the 1st beer’s OG to be 1.088. The second beer’s OG is 1.088-(.088/2)=1.044
to calculate the full 10 gallons OG add the two OG’s & divide by 2. (1.088+1.044)/2 = 1.066. Use 1.066 for your target OG for a 10 gallon batch.
For the SRM you can use .4 as a multiplier and be real close. Say for your 1st beer you expect an SRM of 35. The second beer’s SRM will be about 35*.4=14.
You can adjust OG’s by blending the wort. If you want to leave the 1st beer as is but want a higher OG for the 2nd beer you can cap it with some grain when you sparge or add DME or LME. Same for SRM. If you want a darker SRM for the second beer just cap it with some dark malt when you sparge.
Batch sparging works great for Partigyles because you have the 2nd runnings available shortly after the 1st runnings so you can blend & start boiling right away.
Here’s Mosher’s article that has links to the tables. http://brewingtechniques.com/library/backissues/issue2.2/mosher.html
Hope this helps… Cheers!!!
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