Back in the old days, when industrial brewers had less technology and worse malt to work with, they used a method called Parti-Gyle to extract as much of the sugar from their grains as possible. One technique that was used, is the Parti-Gyle. Essentially, brewers would mash their grains, and run off a certain amount of high-gravity wort, for use in something like a barley wine or a strong ale. Now, if you take a full batch-sparge session (where you rinse the grains a few times successively), the first third of of the wort you run off contains about half of …

I was checking on the wheat beer that I split and racked onto persimmons and black raspberries, and I noticed that there was some foam on top of a third fermentation vessel in the same closet. In that vessel, I had left a little wheat beer and slurry, onto which I poured a diluted black raspberry juice syrup. The first dilution was probably not thin enough, because the yeast did practically nothing, but when I diluted it further, the yeast still refused to act. So I did what the lazy man does: I left the quart jar of twice-diluted syrup …