Party! Parti! Partigyle! Parti-gyle it is a process of making a second or even third batch of beer with one mash.
When mashing, we are simply soaking, steeping and rinsing the grain after the starches have been converted into sugar (wort). Gyle is another word for wort. Thus the name: different parts of wort. So collecting the wort in the early stages will have more color, more flavor and more sugars than later in the process. Imagine trying to make a second batch of coffee from the same grounds. If one takes the “first runnings” and makes a batch of beer, it will be higher in sugars and thus higher in food for the yeast and therefore it has great potential to be higher in alcohol. As the crushed malt is rinsed (called sparging) they are becoming depleted of sugar/flavor. If a “second runnings” were to be collected in same volume as the first, the strength will be much weaker in flavor, sugar, color. It is not only possible to make another batch of beer but it is a very common practice in England to make multiple batches from a single mash during an extended brewday.
Our 100th batch and 101st batches of beer were a parti-gyle brew. The first called, Watt's Wonder turned into a 17+%ABV beer and was very light in color. I then added some brown and chocolate malts to the half-spent grain for color and flavor and the second batch of beer became a brown ale called Watt's Sidekick. This beer only ended up being 4.7%ABV. I wasn't sure it would have been interesting enough, so I added the color and flavor malts just to ensure success. To be clear, the batches were brewed, hopped and fermented completely independently from one another. Only some of the water and barley malt was shared.
Watt's Wonder is a beer with no real beer style. I modeled it after a Belgian golden strong, but it has no Belgian yeast, so therefore it's American (since that's the yeast I used). It was imperialized and added some pure sugar (glucose) to help bump the alcohol up to it's current levels. There is very little hops in this beer, as it drinks more like a barley liquor than a beer. (to be released on National Inventor's Day Feb 11th, 2019)
Watt's Sidekick has some nice biscuit and light roast notes and looks like a Newcastle brown but way more flavorful. (Watt's Sidekick has been available since Jan 20th, 2019)
Prost!