Big Brew Day - 11.10.07

This past Saturday, Scott, Mike, James, and I gathered together for a "big brew day." The idea was to use a lot of ingredients that we had leftover from previous batches. Because we tend to brew separately most of the time, we had a great range of grains, hops, and sugars to choose from. By the time we had all of the potential ingredients in the open, they completely covered Scott's dining room table. To get the most out of the day and our ingredients, we decided to do a parti-gyle brew day, which would mean running off two beers from the same mash. After taking some time to decide what we wanted to brew and how we would differ the second batch, we went ahead with our brewing.

In the end, our first batch ended up as an American Barleywine with a whole lot of hops (about 150-175 IBUs). Based on the small tastes we took before going into the fermenter, it's actually a really well balanced beer. If all goes according to plan, the barleywine should end up at about 9.1% ABV.

Here's a picture of the Barleywine in mid-boil:










To differentiate our second batch, we decided to add some dark grains to the mash before running off. We added just .5 lb of Roasted Barley and .5 lb of Chocolate Wheat and mashed for 15 minutes. When we ran it off, we were really pleased with the change we could see. In the boil, we added English hops to provide even more difference from the barleywine. Based on the numbers, this second beer will fall into the category of a Robust Porter and will come in around 5.2% ABV.

Notice the difference in color for the porter?










Just for fun, I took a quick video of the worts in mid-boil:


This ended up being a great brewday as we got 2 5-gallon batches completed, tasted beers all day, and smoked some cigars to close out the evening. I'm definitely looking forward to doing something like this again soon.