Say I wanted to brew 10 gallons one night ( two five gallon batches of different styles) but I only had one pot that could equip 5 gallons. Could I potentially make a very concentrated wort of base malt and split it amongst the two fermenters and top off, while doing my crystal/carapils/anything additional in smaller household pots and adding my hops to these? Do this even make any sense? Has anyone done this? What kind of problems am I likely to run into?
What style(s)? Extract or all grain? Could you just have time to do two separate boils, it sounds like less of a headache?
Either all grain or extract, it really doesn't matter to me. I was thinking of some kind of pale ale as one style and then anything else. If I could avoid two boils that would be awesome. I'm basically just throwing shit at the wall,,,
Wort darkening due to concentrated wort boiling, low hop utilization, and a possible case of acute dangling participle. If time is not the limiting factor, only kettle size, it would be worth doing a double brew day. The beer will suffer by doing the concentrated boil. The amount will be determined by factors and details of your process we don't know.
In theory, you could probably do it, but calculating your hop additions would be fairly painful if you're not hopping the base grain wort, just hopping the crystal grain wort. It seems like the sort of thing that's reasonably feasible from a functional perspective, but that is unlikely to result in high quality beer.
You can pretty much do anything in brewing and wind up decent with beer. How close the finished beer will be compared to the recipes you formulated, and how well you'd be able to repeat the recipe in the future, would be the two big question marks, IMO.
If you do all grain, you can run off enough for a full volume boil of first runnings into your full size kettle, then run the sparge wort into a 5 gallon bucket (at first). Boil the big batch with all the bittering hops for the full batch. Transfer the sparged portion to two seperate smaller pots, and add any crystal or character malts to steep for 20 mins. Boil it with the flavor and aroma hops for a full size batch. After everything is done boiling and chilling, rack half of the big batch to each fermenter along with the small batch. It may not give you the exact IBUs you are looking for, maybe the aroma might be a little off (dry hop if so), but you will have 2 beers from one night. No reason why this should be any different than beginning extract brewing with concentrated wort boils, and topping off with water in the fermenter. Personally, the added work, clean up, and chilling time for the three different "boils" just seems like too much of a pain. Do you know another brewer who might be able to lend you his keggle? If so, use it, do one full volume boil, and change the beers in the fermenter.
Yeah, a partigyle is definitely possible. You can make a 1.080 beer with your first runnings and a 1.040 beer with your second runnings. While your first beer is on the boil, you can add some crystals to the mash tun. Add your sparge water for gal 6-10 while you are chilling your first beer. Once you free up your your kettle, get your last runnings going into the kettle for your second beer and get ready for another hour of boiling and another 90 minutes of cleanup. You'll effectively cut out an hour's worth of mashing time for two batches. If your mash tun isn't big enough, you can always top off both batches with a calculated amount of water.
