Brewday HOT VIDEO ACTION - Festbier & partigyle patersbier - Single decoction & partial mash

There are a lot of pots on a
decoction brew day.

Sunday... we were up to our usual craziness again.  It was just me and Mark Anthony, and when we brew alone, we tend to do crazy, difficult, and complicated stuff.  Now, I am not necessarily advocating that for any of you.  Especially if you are new to brewing.    But, we like to push ourselves and we enjoy trying new techniques.    So we brewed 8 gallons of beer in about 5 hours.  Both beers were decocted...

We brewed a festbier.  A medium gravity lager that is served at October fest in Germany.  I have written about it before.   It is a fantastic German Lager.  We will be using the fast lager method described on brulosophy.   This beer needs to be step mashed or decocted to get the malty profile and mouth feel that you want in a festbier.   So that is exactly what we did.  But we were using grains from Cargill.  Europils, and Muesserdoerffer Vienna, so we didn't feel the need to do a tripple decoction.  We knew we would get the conversion we were looking for from a single decotion and from a good amylase rest.  We love these grains, and they convert like a mother.  The extraction is always good even in a single stage mash.

We started with a brief enzyme wash at 132 F, for 15 minutes.   That is more than enough time for the enzymes to wash into the wort.    At the end of the enzyme wash we pulled a 2/3 rds decoction and started the crazy process of decocting our mash.    The video below does a pretty good job showing you the decoction process.   Apologies in advance for bad lighting and for my rant 2/3rds of the way through.

Checking the strike temp for the
festbier.  The water is treated.

From there on the festbier was easy, two hop additions, nutrients, and Irish moss.    Neither of these beers are very hoppy, so we used the "no chill" method.   We generally prefer to chill our batches but today, time pressures of normal life meant we would just no chill.   I have never had a problem with "no chill" especially for batches that are not hoppy.    We hit our gravity and we let it chill.   Mark Anthony is taking the batch to Johns tonight to put it into the fermentation chamber for the fast lager method.

rapid boil on the cajun injector

So we had these grains, that had only been decocted once,  they are awesome grains and there was still some sugar in them, 1.013 to be precise.   That is pretty low.  But a patersbier is a low gravity Belgian beer.   If you are not familiar with patersbier, it is a low gravity beer made by the monks for daily consumption.   It is not a blonde ale, or a belgian single.  Although, recently there has been a push to call it a belgian single.   It is made with abbey yeast, not belgian ale yeast.    And most importantly it is delicious.    We knew a pound of pilsen DME and a boil would fix that.

There was a problem with our color... it looked like... ZIMA,  or for you youngsters... a mikes hard lemondade.  It was just too light in color.   Well we know how to fix that.... another decoction.   So I took the grains, put them in a pot and started a decotion.   30 minutes later we had a malty aroma and a wonderful color.   We added the grains in a bag to a bottling bucket and then we poured 4 gallons of treated water at 168 F onto the grains.    A bag and a bottling bucket might be the best way to do a partigyle.   It was so easy.   Think we'll post a video of this process next time.   The batch was brought to a boil on the stove and usual brewing practices took place.  We added Saaz hops at 60, 30, 15, and 0.  Irish Moss and yeast nutrient at 10 minutes.    The final gravity was 1.044, which is a little high for a patersbier.  But it will be delicious.

And for those of you who doubt that we can get a rigourous boil on the cajun injector, here is an older video of a 6.5 gallon wort boiling.