First attempt at a partigyle and my word, was it a fiasco.
First off, my lovely missus bought me a 40 litre Nordic thermo pot for my birthday.
Naturally I wanted to use this as soon as possible, so a quick run to the plumbers merchant at the end of my road and it was up and running. HOwever, I had worked out my recipe using the somewhat rubbish efficiency of my old cool-box mash tun. more of this later I fear.
I planned 23 litres of roughly 4.5% 'every day' stout with 5 litres of Imperial Stout as a partigyle. So thanks to the JBK helpline, this was worked out on Brewpal as a single recipe for 33litres of roughly 4.8%. I asked Dedken of these pages to pop over to lend a hand for the inevitable faffing around, as I was confident it would be a doddle with an extra pair of hands.
What could possibly go wrong?
Several things as it happens.
Thing 1
My collapsible table that I 'inherited' when I moved in to my house did as it's name suggests sending 23litres of sparge water at 70-odd degrees all over the floor. I jumped out the way, then had to jump back into the way to switch off the power. Not fun. As a result the grain basically had a second mash while I re-heated another load of water. As a result of this came
Thing 2
I completely forgot to add the 50g of Northdown to the Imperial Stout boiling on the cooker due to emergency mopping up. and had to boil for an extra hour to get the necessary IBU's (about 120)
Thankfully Ken arrived to share a couple of beers and put the world to rights, but he couldn't help with
Thing 3
I was planning on using 1 sachet of s-05 on the 23l brew and one of Nottingham on the smaller. However, having got the starters going the Nottingham basically stunk like old cabbage (batch number 1080961--3v - two of the numbers have been rubbed off) and I only had a lager yeast and some t-58 in the fridge.
To cut a long story short, Ken had to leave sometime before January, and as things were going, that may have been pushing it.
Eventually, using a bit of free cooling
and utilising the waste disposal units for the spent grain
I ended up with a truly monstrous 1160 Imperial which I diluted down to make 5 litres of about 1120, and bunged the rest back in to the main boil.
This then came out at 1060, so obviously the new mash tun is far more efficient and I'll have to bear this in mind next time.
Hopefully the T-58 won't get too fruity in the Imperial, but after the day I had it was a relief just to see these bloinking away this morning in the cellar
I have split the Imperial across two fermenters, a demi-john and a rather ghetto looking mineral water bottle as I'm sure this is going to spew like a wino at an all-you-can-drink buffet.
Given the disastrous day, if these work out, they're going to be called 'Happy Ending Stout'
(if I can slip that one under the radar) and Rasputin's Stash after this particularly dirty grouphttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmpYEJnGKLQ
