DnD Beer

I brewed a beer with DnD in mind. Sorta. See, I love both drinking beer and playing dnd. SO obviously they should combine great. Except being a dungeon master doesn't lend itself to the pleasant un-focus of a couple of high gravity beers. So I made a really tasty low abv beer, and a slightly stronger beer, and also a session IPA. On the Same Day. 13.5 gallons of beer in one day? Yes sir. See how, after the break.
 I did a partigyle, obviously.
One Mash, Two Beers, Can't Lose.

Note: This brewday was 100% made possible by my tireless assistant, the player in my DnD group who painted all the minis and drew our characters. He did a lot of lifting and stirring and whatnot that would have eaten up too much time to make the day efficient without him there.

Also note: I made about 3L worth of London Ale III Wyeast 1318 starter the day before. Each beer ended up getting a liter of this at the end of the day. Decanting did not happen, I never get it together to have these crashed and ready for decanting.

While I was waiting for strike water to heat up and for the mash to do its thing, I also made an extract 30 minute boil beer. Because I'm a genius like that- no time wasted.

Extract Beer

3.3lb Pale Ale LME (Briess)

2.5ish Golden Light DME (Briess) (Ish b/c the other bit used in starters)

30 - .5 Citra

30 -.5 Mosaic

5 - .5Mosaic

0 - 1oz Citra Hop Hash (A new YCH thing)

7days (1oz Mozaic, .5oz Citra)

OG (est.) 44

OG (Actual) 44

IBU 40

SRM 4

ABV about 4.2

This was only a 30 minute boil total, it was cooling as I was mashing in on the partigyle. My assistant kept the wort chiller stirring during the cooling process, vastly speeding it along so that the kettle that beer boiled in was available for use to catch the first runnings of the partigyle. Honestly this all-extract beer was not fully up to my standards. It lacked any real malt character and didn't have much residual sweetness, but a lot of session IPAs suffer from that so I didn't sweat it. It had lots of hop character, and since it was only about 4% it fulfilled its role as a pounder during long play sessions.

For the Mash and Sparge water for the bigger project of the day, the partigyle beers, I used Bru'n Water to get to the "Edinburgh Boiled" water adjustments. This isn't strictly necessary but if you're not doing water adjustments for your all-grain beers you are totally missing out. Get your water report and plug it into Brungard's spreadsheet and buy some Gypsum and Calcium Chloride and you won't regret it. In this case, I kept the water adjustments the same in both the mash and sparge since the styles I was going for (ordinary bitter and Scottish light pale ale) aren't too far apart.

I use a typical single infusion batch sparge method, with one 1 hour infusion and a 20 minute rest for the sparge water to absorb remaining sugars. 

Partigyle

14lb Golden Promise

1lb Caramel 20

1lb Caramel 120

Mash @ 152 1hour [the coward's mash!] (added 1qt boiling @20mins to correct for temp loss) (about 5 gal)

Collect 2.5 gal. Reserve 1 gallon. Begin boiling 1.5 gallons. 

Add 1lb Golden Promise and .5 lb Caramel 120 to Mash Tun. 

Batch Sparge w/ about 8gallons, collecting a total of about 10.4 gallons of wort. 

Add enough of 2nd runnings to boiling 1.5 gallons of first runnings to get to about 4 gallons. 

Combine remaining 2nd runnings to 1 gallon of reserved first runnings, to get about 6 gallons. 

For the two beers themselves, I used this partigyle gravity calculator to get the approximate gravities for the 1/3 - 2/3 split. I then made recipes in brewtoad that kept similar proportions of base to specialty grains for the appropriate sided batch. Then I scaled them to my actual final volumes and added hop schedules as appropriate for the small beer and its bigger sibling. In the end, the bigger beer wasn't actually a ton bigger (it varied from the recipe, there was more of it and it was weaker) but it was pretty tasty.

I have a plan for a future version of this same idea that I just came up with. Notes in recipe here. For that one, the trick is to do an extract-style steep during the batch sparge rest. This I think will help keep from over-diluting the sugar during the sparge, keep the mash at an appropriate thickness, and make the process fit my system slightly easier, since I have an 8 gallon kettle I use as a hot liquor tank, and otherwise it was over-full for the sparge with this volume of grain.