JimmyBrewsBeer: Parti-Gyle Disaster

Backstory

I had a couple beers going into kegs from primary, and I decided I would do a parti-gyle mash to make 10 gallons, to pitch 5 gals with a slurry of each.

The previous beers were an american trappist clone, and a cascade lager, itself made with a slurry pitch from the lager yeast from my split batch, so it was 3rd generation. The cascade lager was a kit I'd come into, and didn't really need so I was just having some fun with that, by brewing it as a lager, dropping some of the hops as well.

Recipe & Method

Here is the recipe for the parti-gyle batch:

18# 2 row

3# white wheat malt

2# Munich 1(7L)

.5# Caravienne 20

The plan was to take the first runnings, and make a Belgian Tripel, and take the second running and make a lighter lager.

the Tripel hops:

1oz perle 6.4aa @ 60 min

10 grams magnum at 12.4 aa @ 60 min

7 grams stryrian goldings 3.0aa @ 15 min

the lager hops:

1 oz styrian godings @ 60 min

10g magnum @ 60 min

1oz saaz @ 10 min

I built a spreadsheet to track the gravity as I drew off the wort, by taking a refractometer of the runnings every gallon, as well as the total gravity of the entire pot every gallon.

How the day went

Big ass bag of grain, setting up rig for a fly sparge

Mash Tun full to where the lid insert is touching the top of the mash

Was shooting for 150, it settled into 150 after 20 min but was slightly high at first

Drawing off into a pitcher to vorlauf

The first runnings

Hard to read, but the first runnings were coming off at 1.090

I had collected 420 gravity pts into the first pot, so I switched the flow to the lager pot, and topped off the tripel to 7 gallons with water from the HLT

Drawing off into the lager pot

2 going at once. My brother loaned me his burner

Lots of spent grain, about 6 gallons in volume

The wort was still running off at 1.030 when i had collected enough gravity points for the lager, in fact, it was well over what I had intended. I had 6 gallons at 1.055, and I wanted it to finish at 1.050!

This pic is draining what was left in the mash tun into a pitcher to dump. I could have saved it for a starter, but this double batch was taxing enough

The gravity on the Tripel was at 1.083, the the volume was 5 gal on the nose, so it was time to cool.

OH SHIT

I was transporting the tripel to cool it and it tipped, all but 1.5 gallons were running into the grass, into the street

At this point, I had to make a decision. finish the lager as it, or re-adjust the recipes. I decided to add the 1.5 gallons of tripel to the lager, which had boiled down to 4 gallons at this point(I was going to top off with near freezing distilled water). The combined gravity of it was now at 1.070. I added the sugar I was going to add at high krausen, and let it boil for 10 more minutes to sanitize, and then re-sanitize the immersion chiller.

The gravity after the sugar and boiling was 1.082.

Chilling the final batch