Split-Batch Brewing: Adventures in Wood

It's high time a wrote some more brewing advice, so here's the start of a new series of blogs.

This series is inspired by Brad Smith's "Multiplying Your Beer" blog on BeerSmith. In his blog, Brad talks about various ways to get multiple beers out of one brewing session. His work is long on details, but short on examples, so it seems fitting that I try his ideas out and see what happens.

These articles are also an extension of a couple of previous experiments. One base beer resulted in three Abbey Beers back in the Spring. My Session Saison and Dark Saison sprang from the same base as well. The difference here, is that with Split-Batch brewing, you get different beers from a single brew day.

The simplest form of batch splitting is to take finished wort, put it into multiple fermentors and then pitch different yeasts, or perhaps add differing additional ingredients into the fermentor of each beer. In this instance, I'm working with oak aging.

Once Primary Fermentation is complete, I'll split the beer into four different secondary fermentors. The wood will be introduced for the final two weeks of aging. As a control, one of the secondary fermentors will receive no wood at all. The other three will have wood infused with either Bourbon, Rum, or Sherry. When this little project is finished, I hope to have four very different beers made from one brewing session.

The beer itself was going to be a clone of either Boulevard's The Sixth Glass, or Avery's The Reverend. Then I went to the homebrew store near my office. Once again, they didn't have everything I needed to make what I wanted. Therefore, the beer below is an amalgamation of the two, which essentially makes it my own.

Here's my full five gallon brew:

Grains:
10 lbs Rahr 2-Row
1 lb Weyermann Munich Light
12 oz Castle Cara 45
12 oz Castle Special B
8 oz Rahr White Wheat

Hops:
1 oz Sterling (5.7% a.a.): 60 min
1 oz Sterling (5.7% a.a.): 10 min

Extras:
1.5 lbs Amber Homemade Candi Sugar: 0 min
8 oz Dark Brown Homemade Candi Sugar: 0 min

Total Boil Time:

90 min

Yeast:
Wyeast 1762 - Belgian Abbey II

Mash Schedule:
Protein Rest: 124F for 20 min
Saccharification Rest: 150F for 60 min
Mashout: 168F for 15 minutes

Original Gravity:
1.085
Estimated Final Gravity:
1.015

IBU: 25
SRM Color: 21

Fermentation Schedule:
2 Weeks Primary
6 Weeks Secondary
2 Weeks Secondary with Oak
2-4 Weeks Bottle Conditioning

Secondary Fermentors:
No Oak (Secondary #1)
0.5 oz Bourbon Oak Chips (Secondary #2)
0.5 oz Rum Oak Chips (Secondary #3)
0.5 oz Sherry Oak Chips (Secondary #4)

Cost: $22 per case
Commercial Equivalent: Avery Reverend: $80 per case
Savings: $58