Parti-Gyle: Imperial Cashew Brown / Honey Nut Brown

In my brewing setup my mash-tun's capacity is around 24 pounds of grain when I mash in relatively thick with a ratio of 1.5 quarts to pounds of grain. This means two things specifically. One, I can brew a 5 gallon batch of high gravity beer that can come in at 1.105 S.G. These are the biggest numbers I have seen on my setup, when I brewed my Scottish Wee Heavy. Two, this means that I can do some pretty cool split batches or parti-gyles. Parti-gyles are when you take your second runnings from your mash and make a completely separate beer from it. It works well with beers that have around the same grain bill ala Barleywine and British Bitter. I have done this before with my Harvest Saison / Raspberry Sour and fairly easy to do.

The idea for this beer came from a beer I sampled a couple years ago called Cashew Mountain Brown from Founder Brewing. The beer was an imperial brown ale aged in bourbon barrels filled with cashews and aged in a mountain cave in Grand Rapids, MI where the brewery is located. I love cashews and I think the brown ale will work well with the rich flavor of them. I decided I am going take the first 1/3 of the runnings which should come in around 1.095 s.g. for this beer and the the second 2/3 of the runnings around 1.060 s.g I am going use for a basic honey brown. The honey should boost the second brown ale up to 1.070 s.g not including the boil off and an addition of light brown sugar to the imperial version should boost this up to 1.101 o.g.

To get the cashew flavor I am looking for I mashed 1 1/2 pounds of dry roasted unsalted cashews along with the grain. I also am using a unique new method taken from October 2012 issue of Brew Your Own, called fat washing. Basically you steep something high in fat in boiling water, freeze that liquid, scrape the fat off the top and use the liquid itself to flavor your beer. I did this exact process with the addition of toasting the cashews with a kitchen torch before I steeped them. Lets hope this works!

Recipe Specs:

21 pounds Crisp Maris Otter malt
1 pound Special B malt
1 pound Briess Caramel 60 malt
.75 pounds Pale Chocolate malt
.5 pounds Caramunich malt

Imperial Cashew Brown Ale Hops/Etc.

16 ounces of Cashew Extract

1 1/2 pounds Organic Light Brown Sugar @5 mins.

1.5 ounces US Magnum hops 13.1 aau @ 60 mins. = 50.34 IBUs
1 ounce Fuggles hops 5.6 aau @ 10 mins. = 4.46 IBUs

Wyeast 1028 London Ale yeast

Honey Nut Brown Hops/Etc.

12 ounces Local Honey

1 oz. Willamette hops 9.3 aau 60 mins. = 26.55 IBUs
1 oz. Fuggles hops 5.6 aau @ 30 mins. = 12.29 IBUs

Wyeast 1275 Thames Valley Ale yeast

11/7/12 Mashed in with 25 quarts of 167 degree water for 60 minutes and collected 4.5 gallons of 1.096 s.g wort and 6 gallons of 1.062 s.g wort. Boiled both, added sugars and cashew extract at the end of the boil. Chilled and aerated both for 30 minutes.

Imperial Cashew Brown 1.128 O.G. 54.80 IBUs

Honey Nut Brown Ale 1.070 O.G. 38.83 IBUs