First Impressions - Dr Jekyl, Dr Jekyl & Mr Hyde

Last month I brewed up my first ever parti-gyle recipe, from that I got three beers, a double IPA (Mr Hyde), an APA (Dr Jekyl) and during bottling I blended some of the beer to give me an IPA (Dr Jekyl & Mr Hyde). Last night I tasted the bottled version of Dr Jekyl.



Dr Jekyl, has a very
refreshing bitter bite to it.

First thing I must say is that I have been drinking this beer from the keg for a few weeks and ahead of this weeks ICB tasting night I decided that I should sample one of the bottles. The first thing that I noticed was that this beer turned out considerably different than the kegged version!

The beer pours a rich amber colour with a thick creamy head. The aroma is well balanced , quite malty but with a nice layer of citrus hop flavour on top. The bitterness of this beer is what hits you first when you taste it, however there is very little of the cascade flavour that was so dominant in the kegged version, thats very unusual. The bitterness and the low level of carbonation makes this a really refreshing beer. The amazing thing is that this beer smells and tastes very different to the kegged version. I would nearly think that I had mis-labelled the bottles, but I know I definitely did not. Overall very happy with this beer.



Certainly the most complex
beer I have ever brewed.

 Purely for comparison purposes I also tried a bottle of the blended beer last night and I thought this was fantastic. At 6.4% and having only been in the bottle for three weeks it is still very young, however it is really good. It pours a similar colour and appearance to Mr Hyde. The aroma has a lot more citrus hops, really nice grapefruit aroma, not overpowering, just nice. It has a medium body with a nice level of carbonation. The flavour is a nice balance of hops and malts. The citrus flavour of the hops is very apparent along with a marmalade like flavour. The bitterness in this version is rather subdued as it is drowned out slightly by these two dominant flavours. There is a slightly unusual, but not unpleasant, aftertaste that I can't quite put my finger on, it certainly finishes quite dry but there is something else there that I cannot quite identify.

I think this beer will only improve with age. You certainly wouldn't think it is 6.4%. This is definitely one of the most complex flavoured beers that I have brewed and I am really looking forward to trying it's big brother, the 8.4% Double IPA, Mr Hyde.

One Mash, Three Beers

So I got around to bottling and kegging my Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde beers today. The plan was to bottle all of the Mr hyde, about 26 x 500ml bottles, bottle 6 x 500ml of the Dr Jekyl and then keg the rest of the Dr Jekyl. In the end I actually bottled three different beers.

First off this was a parti-gyle style beer with a big beer (Mr Hyde) and a small beer (Dr Jekyl). This was the first time I had ever attempted this type of brewing and so the brew day threw up some unexpected results, however this has been a process that I have really enjoyed and something that I will certainly try again.

Not happy with just producing two beers when it came to bottling day I decided that it would be interesting to also bottle a blended version of these beers. Due to the fact that they both came from the same mash I thought that this would work well. At the end of bottling day I had:

5 x 500ml bottles and 1 x corny keg of Dr Jekyl - American Pale Ale (4.3%)

18 x 500ml bottles of Mr Hyde - American Double IPA (8.4%)

6 x 500ml bottles of Dr Jekyl & Mr Hyde - American Blended IPA (6.35%)

The proof as they say will be in the tasting, and I am really looking forward to trying these three beers in a couple of weeks time. The DIPA tasted really good from the fermenter, boozy but with a great hop kick. The APA on the other hand tasted a little thin but had a great hop flavour, hopefully this will develop a little body during its conditioning.

In a few weeks time I will post the results of the first tasting, I'll try the three beers in one sitting, this will be a little unfair on the DIPA as it will need more time to condition properly, but this should give me a good early indicator of how these beers have turned out.

AG #5 and #6 - Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde - Brew Day

For some time I have been wanting to change my brew day process in order to maximise my volumes due to the fact that I have less time to brew. With that in mind I decided to brew a parti-gyle beer which would allow me to create two brews from the one mash. Parti-gyle involves using a grain heavy mash and producing one strong beer from the first running and then a weaker beer from the second runnings. I decided to forulate a recipe that would produce an IPA and an APA. The recipe I came up with I called Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde.

One of the challenges with parti-gyle brewing is recipe formulation and gravity calculations and this is the one area where I fell down on this brew. I had estimated that I would be able to produce a beer of 1066 from the first runnings and then a beer of 1040 from the second runnings. The seconds runnings produced a beer of 1043 and so I was happy with that, however the first beer produced a monster of 1122! Obviously I had miscalculated along the way and so in the end I diluted this first beer down to a more manageable 1078.

Here are some pics of the brew day:

A total grain bill of 8.95KG was used, this was supplemented in the second runnings by the addition of 300g of DME. The grain used was Maris Otter, Munich, Crystal and Carapils.

One of the areas that I had struggled with in the past was to keep my mash temperature up, however having insultaed the mash tun much better I managed to only lose 1c over the course of the 60 minute mash. I mashed in at 68c and the temperature only dropped to 67 in the last 10 minutes.

This amount of grain was the most I ever used and certainly tested the max capacity of my mash tun. In fact I could not fit enough water in to give me the water to grain ratio I wanted and so I did a mini sparge of 5 litres to give me my target pre boil volume of 14.5 litres for the strong beer.

The first runnings appear very dark which is what you would expect from a 1122 wort.

No issues with the brew day as a whole (apart from the gravity miscalculation). Did two separate boils and the total brew day lasted 8 hours which was long, but at the end of it I had 20 litres of 1043 APA and 14 litres of a 1078 IPA. Fermenting both with US-05 and the next morning they were both fermenting happily.

Parti-gyle calculations:

Here is how I calculated my gravities, obviously it went drastically wrong somewhere and so if anybody can offer any advice that would be great. In order to get the total mash gravity I put all of the grain into beer tools and set it at a volume of 41.5 litres (14.5 for the big beer and 27 for the small beer). Beer Tools told me that this would give me a total batch gravity of 1044. If I split the batch into 1/3 - 2/3 then I estimated that I should get 1066 from the first third and 1040 from the second 2/3. Now obviously something went wrong as I ended up with 1122 from the first 1/3. Can anyone spot any obvious mistakes from what I did?

AG #5 and #6 - Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde - Recipe

I have been wanting to come up with a Parti-Gyle recipe for a while in order to increase my brew day capacity (due to the fact that brew days are few and far between these days) and so this is what I have come up with:

Total Grain Bill will be:
5200g Maris Otter
2800g Munich Malt
350g Crystal 100 (100g will be added after the first runnings and allowed steep for 20 mins)
150g Crystal 60 (All will be added after the first runnings and allowed steep for 20 mins)
190g Caraipls (.25kg will be added after the first runnings and allowed steep for 20 mins)

This should give me a total batch gravity of 1044. Using a Parti-gyle of 1/3 - 2/3 this should give me an IPA of 1066 and an APA of 1040 (the APA boosted by the addition of 300g of DME late in the boil).

Edit : Check out the brew day post to see how I fared (major gravity miscalculation happened!)

The hops schedules are as follows:

Dr Jekyl - AIPA (14.5 litres) - 6.5%

21g Chinook - 60 mins
32g Cascade - 15 mins
32g Amarillo - 1 mins
35g Cascade - 1 mins

IBU's approximately 67

Mr Hyde - APA (27 litres) - 3.9%

15g Chinook - 60 mins
20g cascade - 15 mins
22g cascade - 10 mins
20g cascade - 5 mins
20g cascade - 1 min

IBU's approximately 30

Hoping to brew this up next week and will report back with how it all went, this will be my first attempt at this type of process (i.e. Partigyle) and so I expect an eventful brew day!