Fullers Party-gyle

Parti-gyle , as most homebrewers know it, is the process of creating a mash and using the first and strongest runnings for a strong beer, like a Barleywine and using the weaker second runnings for a milder (aka small) beer. Historically that practice fell by the wayside and was replaced with a method of blending the strong and weak worts together with different ratios to create several beers in a Breweries catalog.

Fullers, it seems, uses the two sets of runnings to create Golden Pride Barleywine, London Pride, ESB and Chiswick Bitter. You’re probably wondering why a brewery would do this , so were we. For the answer to that, we turned to notable beer historian, Ron Pattinson. In his blog, Shut up about Barclay Perkins, he writes:

There are two main reasons for parti-gyling:

1. It allows brewers to produce a variety of beers of different strengths an in different quantities on one set of equipment.

2. 2. It's very efficient. That's the main reason Fullers still parti-gyle.

The big brewers in 19th century London had equipment with a brew length of 500 to 1,000 barrels. For beers that sold in smaller quantities, like really strong Stouts, brewing such beers entire gyle would be very wasteful. You'd be under-utilising your equipment. Rather than brew 100 barrels of Imperial Stout in equipment designed to brew 1,000 barrels at a time, you'd brew 100 barrels of Stout and 900 barrels of Porter at the same time. Much more efficient.

According to Schollmeyer and CYBI podcasters here’s how a homebrewer can replicate what Fuller's does.

· The Recipe is basically 95% Maris Otter & 5% 80L Crystal with a tiny amount of chocolate if coloring is needed.

· Mash and run off into first kettle until full then sparge into second kettle.

· Boil 60 minutes with 2/3 of bittering hops in first kettle, 1/3 in second.

· Blend after boiling to desired beer profile. Barleywine & Chiswick Bitter would be 80/20. London Pride & ESB would be closer to 50/50.

Armed with that information, here’s what we attempted on the Learn to Brew Day Brewout:

· Make a recipe of 95/5 Maris Otter/Crystal 80 that targets 22 gallons post boil of 1.060 wort at 60 IBUs.

· Mash @ 148. Use Target for bittering hop, Challenger & Golding during last 3 min.

· We can decide what split to do during the boil based on what the first versus second runnings are and what strength beers we want to end up with

And here is the recipe Schollmeyer came up with

40.75 lbs Crisp Maris Otter
2.15 lbs British 60
3 oz Target - 60 min
.75 oz Golding - 3 min

4.5 oz Challenger - 3 min

The CYBI episode actually called for equal amounts of Challenger & Northdown but not sure if anyone has Northdown. Dry hop for the ESB was Golding. We can decide on that later depending on what we end up doing on the post-boil blend. I'm thinking something like 80-20 would probably get us into English Barleywine & Ordinary Bitter range.

Pre-boil:

12.5G @ 20.5 Plato
12.25G @ 8.4 Plato

Post-boil

10.5G @ 23.3 Plato
10.25G @ 9.6 Plato

Blended 80/20 calculated:
Beer1: 20.3 Plato
Beer2: 12.34 Plato

We’ll post our results in an upcoming blog.