New Years Eve Parti-Gyle Partial Mash Vatted Wit

Back in the days before refined sugars were common it was down to the brewer to get all of his fermentables out of the grain that he was using. Initially the grain (mainly barley) was left to germinate but was then heated to stop the germination process, which trapped the sugars that would have been used to feed the young shoot inside the grain. This is the malting process. The grain was then broken into smaller pieces to open up the hard outer shell  - this is known as cracking. The cracked grain was soaked in water at an appropriate temperature (generally around 62-68 degrees C), which triggered off enzymes inside the grain which help pull the trapped sugars  out of the grain and into the solution. This is known as the mashing process, and it produces a sticky sugary solution called a wort. And finally the grains were separated from the wort and washed down with water in order to pull out every possible bit of sugar - this is called the sparge. The weird names are because these processes have been carried out for hundred and maybe thousands of years, long before the introduction of hops into brewing, by many different cultures and in many different ways. I like to think that whenever I brew I'm not just making beer, I'm making history come alive.*

In Medieval times the brewers needed to provide differing strength ales for their different customers, and one of the ways of doing this was to use 'Parti-Gyle Brewing'. With this system the first runnings (ie the original wort), which are rich in sugars and highly fermentable, were used to brew strong beers. The grains were then sparged and the subsequent infusions used to produce less strong beers - important not just for a 'common' beer (what we'd call a session beer) but also because the water quality could be so poor that the brewing process actually made it drinkable.

I decided to try a variant on the parti-gyle style brew process with grains left over from my Saison-Wit. I sparged the grains a second time and made sure that they were thoroughly dunked, squeezed, poked and massaged in order to extract as much sugar as possible. I ended up with around 10l of liquid with a gravity of around 1.018.

This is only enough sugar to produce a very weak brew, so I needed to add some more fermentables to it - somewhat defeating the object I know, but it's not just interesting and fun, it also makes more beer. True parti-gyle brewing would have produced about 5 - 10l of a strong (9%)  brew and around 15l of around 4-5% beer.

I boiled the insipid mix for half an hour or so with 10g of Hallertau and it smelt overly sweet and a bit tart. I think that I may have inadvertently introduced a wild yeast into the mix by washing the grain in room temperature water which was adding a lambic or sour element (often known as 'vatted'). Coincidentally this is a desired trait of some Wit beers so I thought I'd press on regardless...

I added in half a kilo of wheat malt and the same of pale malt half an hour into the boil with 15g of Saaz and finished off with 15 g of Saaz, the zest of an orange and two chamomile teabags with 5 minutes to go.

It's a small batch so I pitched with half a packet of genetic wheat beer yeast, although the ambient temperatures may be a bit much for the yeast to handle. Not much I can do about that though.

I'll only get 10 bottles or so from this and there's a lot that could go wrong but it's been a fun experiment. And rest assured I'll drink a bottle and monitor its effects for 48 hrs before I hand any out!

*More importantly, I'm making beer.