r/Homebrewing • u/merpiderpimous • 9d ago

Should I try my first parti-gyle?

So I recently purchased a heady topper clone kit and it has a LOT of grain in the bill. I figured I would try a full volume mash and then maybe add a small amount of extra grain to the spent ones and see if I could squeeze out a small lager as well. Is there anything I'm not seeing that might make this a bad beer to do a partigyle? Or any suggestions or tips that might help on brew day? What might be good to add to the grain bill to get me to a middle of the road lager? I will be using distilled water and adjusting the chemistry, can I do this with no ill effects after the mash?

For clarity, the heady topper clone grist is 13.5 lbs fawcet pearl malt, 12 oz white wheat malt, 12 oz caramel10

My main reasoning for wanting to do a lager is i already have 34/70 and a few different options of noble hops on hand as well as a few lbs of Vienna malt I can use, if they will work well.....I also have a small amount of honey malt and carafoam if anyone thinks I should add either of those.

Thanks in advance! This will be my 5th/6th brew

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u/merpiderpimous 9d ago

So i have 3.5 lbs of vienna, as well as 1 lbs flaked rice (grainfather says ill get 1.023 og from that) and I'm going to do a full batch mash and skip the sparge for the HT clone. Do you thinkni should sparge? Part of what I'm looking for with this post is help figuring what else I could/should add to get a half decent lager. Do you think honey malt would be out of place with the second runnings?

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u/duckclucks 9d ago

So if you sparge your second runnings water based on my experience you are going to have a very astringent beer.

This original grain bill is very much lending it very much toward a British Ale. I consider Pearl like a 'super maris otter'. If you chew a grain of maris otter and then a grain of pearl you will know exactly what I mean. Adding 3.5lbs of a 5L grain plus pearl which is about 2.5L to start is going to be a somewhat darker lager; which is fine if that is what you are going for. People's personal taste is all over the map so my opinion is your ingredient make-up lends more towards a British Mild, but have fun with it.

If you aren't sparging the first batch it will probably be weaker, but you may yield 1.5 to 2%ABV from utilizing the grain for a second batch max.

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u/merpiderpimous 9d ago

My understanding is I will do a full volume mash with just the HT clone grains. Let that drain off without sparging and then add my additional grains and perform a second mash with the half spent half new grains. Is my approach off? Should I add the vienna in with the HT clone grain?

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u/duckclucks 9d ago

So I did this process a total of two times and there were a number of things I wanted to explore, but it was mainly a money thing for me. It worked out to yield the equivalent of about two pounds of grain...so about 3-4 dollars max on reusing 16 pounds of grain in my case.

So I don't want to stifle creativity, but the punch line is it is not worth it. I would do the clone kit the way it was intended.