This is the second brew of a parti-gyle brewing session. I discussed the first part of that session, and the naming of the brews, here. I decided to experiment with making a lighter, milder, but still-intensely hoppy IPA-ish brew after reading a bit about experiments towards that style by The Mad Fermentationist, and discussions among a few brewers here in Korea regarding the brewing of a hoppy session ale. I figured I would try making a hoppy, low-ABV beer with some of my favorite hops — Citra and Sorachi Ace — to see whether I could pull it off. Since …

I want to name today’s brews — a partigyle double batch, both in the AIPA-ish style — simply “IPA” but I want to write it in the other IPA — the International Phonetic Alphabet. Apparently, that looks like this: aɪ pʰiː eɪ? If I planned on bottling it, I’d probably have fun doing up a label, but I’ll almost certainly be kegging these two batches. As I mentioned, this is to be a parti-gyle brew, and instead of blending runnings, I’m simply going to cap the mash and let it sit for an hour more before pulling the second half …

For the last couple of weekends, The Magpie Brewing Company (with the support of Homebrew Korea and the inimitable Bill Miller) has hosted some 80L brewdays. The idea is: you take four homebrewers, get them together, and host a brewday at their brewing space, which has the equipment for you to brew up to 80L (or more?) of beer at one time. Since there’s four brewers, you can split the wort 4 ways, have them each pitch their own yeast into the beer, and then you end up (after four such brewdays) with 320L of beer, split into 16 different …

I’m incredibly busy at the moment with a few writing deadlines, but I never feel quite right when my fermenters are all empty, so I figured I’d do a quick parti-gyle brew today and ended up with the simplest recipe possible: a partigyle, 50/50, with 7.3 kilograms of pilsner as the complete mash. I can split the wort runoff at the 50% point and end up with a good strong wort for making a Belgian Golden Strong Ale (adding a packet of clear candi syrup, of course) and still have a 1.031 wort to blend some honey into, in order …

On Wednesday, I made the trek out to Hannam Hanam City, to the home of my friends Rowan and Sophie, in order to brew up a Wit beer with Rowan… a Belgian Wit beer made with Earl Grey tea… and that’s not the only thing that makes it unusual. This is the second experiment we’ve done with brewing a wheat beer, and the twist is that we supplemented the wheat with some pasta — in this case, rotini. We didn’t use a lot: though we added about 500 grams of it to the cereal mash, some got burnt to the …