I have completely forgotten that for one of the up coming contests, the special category is Partigyle. Where two (or more) beers are made from the same mash. Traditionally a strong first beer then progressively weaker beers.

Way back in beer history, and as it still is now, making high gravity beer was not easy to do. Today homebrewers can dump loads of extract to push gravities. But centuries ago the easiest method was to use large amounts of grain and use only the first and usually undiluted runnings.

While this did make strong or even very strong beers, the left over mash still contained useable sugars. Instead of wasting the substantial amount of grains/sugars, that mash was sparged again to get a weaker gravity wort for a second and possibly a third beer.

Us homebrewers generally do the exact same thing for partigyle. Big mash for a barleywine, dopplebock, tripel or other big beer. Then refill the run and sparge out a mild, dunkle or pilsner  out of whats left.

For this contest we will need to bring both beers, (the big and smaller gravity) and will be judged together. Quite a difficult thing to do really.
Making the seperate beers is easy, its timing them right. We are about 4 months out from judging. Getting a huge beer mellowed out by then could be tricky,, and keeping a light beer at peak could also be challenging, as flavors and aromas begin to fade.

I think I will be going something around a British strong ale, maybe nudge into barleywine range.. then a bitter.   Gonna havta start running those numbers and get this going this week.

So look for those updates.