Learning to Parti Properly

You may remember that a while back I did a little experiment, which I thought was parti-gyling but in fact turned out to be medieval style parti-gyling. I brewed two beers, one porter and one mild, from a single batch of grain, taking the first runnings for a small batch of porter and the second and third runnings for the mild.

While both beers turned out rather drinkable, it was brought to my attention that the process I had followed was a long rejected method. One thing I hope I never have a problem with is being told that I was wrong and then being corrected (how else does one learn?), so firstly I want to thank Ron Pattinson for putting me straight on parti-gyling and then putting up with my stupid questions so that I could get a clear picture of the process.

Having been a technical writer when I lived in Prague, I thought I would take the information from Ron and break the process into simple steps for people to understand so they can have a bash at parti-gyle for themselves, and hopefully I have understood this all properly.

1. Mash the grist as you would do normally
2. Drain the mash tun
3. Re-mash the grist
4. Drain again
5. Sparge
6. Boil the worts
7. Blend to achieve desired gravities
8. Ferment
9. Bottle
10. Drink

Ron mentioned to me that sometimes the grist would be mashed as many as 4 times in order to get as much extract out of the grain as possible. Given this corrected information, I will be doing another parti-gyle experiment at some point in the future, probably using a grist of 95% Pale Malt and 5% Dark Crystal, to make a strong pale ale and a pale mild. For a more thorough exploration of parti-gyling, see Ron's post here.

Just a quick aside, I think the greatest example of user documentation I have ever seen was in Prague, and I present this picture in evidence.