Month: July 2010

American Rye and Wheat Beer

Posted by mac – 2010-07-25

Batch #9 needs a snappy name, but my beer marketing department is on the West Coast at a conference, so for now this one is retaining its boring development name.  If TGL were here, it’d have a greek myth name at least.

Threw this recipe together myself, with nothing more than the BJCP style guidelines for “American Wheat or Rye Beer” (I told you I needed a more imaginative name).

Stats:

  • OG: 1.047
  • FG: 1.012
  • IBU: 18
  • ABV: 4.7
  • SRM: 5* (Yellow to Gold)

Greedys

  • 5.5 lbs US 2-Row Pale Malt
  • 2 lbs Rye Malt
  • 1.5 lbs Wheat Malt
  • 1 lb Crystal 20
  • 1 lb Rice Hulls (damn slow sparges!!)
  • 0.5 oz x 8.7% AA Amarillo Pellets @60 min
  • 0.2 oz x 7.5% AA Cascade Pellets @ 15 min
  • Wyeast 1010 American Wheat

After two not-so-great brew sessions with the stupid Blue Moon clone, I felt like I needed another shot at a beer with some wheat in it.  That said, I’m still a little gun shy around non-barley grains, so i kept this one well below 50% wheat and rye.  I wanted to try the three stage mash again (beta glucanase rest to break down the gum, protease to break down some proteins, and saccharification to make some sugar), but because of the difficulty i had last time trying to accomplish all that with hot water infusions into my 5 gal cooler, I decided to try stovetop mashing in my brewpot, then transferring to the cooler for the sparge.

Mash Schedule

  • Beta Glucanase rest: 20 min at 110*F
  • Protease rest: 20 min at 122*F
  • Saccharification: 3o min at 154*F

I went with 15 quarts of water, which is about all I figured i could safely expect to fit into my 5 gal cooler.  I heated it to 115*F and added the grist.  that brought me damn close to the target 110*F, and I was suprised to find that it only made up about 5 gal of wort (I was expecting closer to 5.5 gal).

Wary of slow sparges from thick mashes, I decided to add a quart of boiling water as part of my heating to the second rest.  that got me about half way, and I fired up the stove for the rest, stirring periodically.  It took about 5 minutes to come up to 122*F by my probe thermometer, then I killed the stove.

Every few minutes i’d stir and take a temp reading or six.  even at ~1.5 qts/lb, there were hot and cool spots in the mash, and apparently the heating process had left some hot pockets down low that I didn’t know about, because 10 min into the rest, the measured temp was now ~8-10*F too hot, right at the upper limit of the protease range.

After the 20 minutes were up, i fired up the stove again on the way to 154*F.  I stopped the stove when I got a reading of 150, wary of overshooting.  Turns out i should have stopped much sooner, because a few minutes later I was getting readings in the 165-170 range.  Yikes! Thats the temp where the enzymes I need start dying off (or whatever it is that enzymes do when they stop working).  In goes two trays of ice cubes.  They melt.  temps still in the 160-167 range.  Oh well.

Wait.  This thermometer isn’t working right.  My fantastic “Super Fast Thermopen” isn’t working right…at all.  I switch to the cheap probe on the kitchen timer, and it turns out that the mash is actually around 135*F.  WTF. Back on the stove.  My planned 30 minutes for this rest have come and gone, but i give it another 20 more on the stove, stirring and heating.  When the readings get to 145-155*F, I called it quits and poured it all into the cooler to lauter.  We’re winging it now.  It JUST fit.

This sparge FLEW.  Turns out rye isn’t nearly as unruly as wheat and oats (or so it seems).  Sparged with 17qts water at ~168*F.  Collected so much wort that i needed to dump some.

Boil was thankfully uneventful.  Chilling takes forever.  I need to upgrade from my 25ft immersion cooler. Maybe i’ll make a new one out of 50ft, or maybe i’ll get a fancy counterflow guy.  This is just a lot of waiting, and a lot of wasted water.  I’ve already mopped the floors, watered the plants, and refilled the toilet tank with chiller outflow, now the rest is going down the drain.

90 minutes of chilling, poured off the trub, yielding about 4.8 gal at a corrected OG of 1.046. Pitched Wyeast 1010 American Wheat at about 80*F.

UPDATE 2010-07-24

Came back from a day at the beach, opened the apartment door and smelled beer. The ferment went wild and blew out through the airlock, making a nice pool of near beer on the floor.  First time that’s happened, extra surprising given the couple extra inches of headspace this time from the slightly smaller batch.

Blue Moon Clone Revisited

Posted by mac – 2010-07-23

I’ll call this batch 8.1.  Brew Day was 2010-07-07

After the disastrous outcome of the previous attempt at brewing this Blue Moon clone recipe, I went back to John Palmer’s How To Brew to see if I could figure out where I’d gone wrong.

One of the things that I picked up was that the protein rest (that I’d recollected was so important for mashes with a high percentage of wheat and unmalted grain in the bill) actually doesn’t do much to avoid stuck sparges, as I’d thought.  Either I read it wrong the first time or I’d made it up in my head.  Turns out there’s a Beta Glucanase rest that is supposed to prevent gumminess.  I decided for the second attempt that I’d include this Beta Glucanase rest.  Also, I added 1 lb of rice hulls for some drainage.

My Beta Glucanase rest was to be 110*F for 20 min, Protease rest 122*F for 20 min, and finally the main event at 154*F for 30 min.

I came out a little hot for the Beta Glucanase at 118, hit my temp for the Protease rest pretty well, and did pretty well on the saccharification rest.

The thing is, I had to do all of this in a 5 gal rubbermaid drink cooler, which doesn’t leave much room for water when you’ve got 11 lbs of grain.  Also, since i’m doing infusion mashing, and wanted three different temperatures, my first rest was super stiff at 8 qts water to 11 lbs grain (so that i could add water to hit my second and third rests).

After all that work, the sparge was still slow as hell (90 minutes to collect 4.5 gal).  I started brewing after work (always a dumb idea), and I didn’t pitch the yeast until 2:30 AM.  I was a tired, grumpy dude, but I wasn’t about to give up on a second shot at this.

The first taste on the way into the primary fermenter had a sharply bitter finish, maybe from the bitter orange peel.  I hoped it would mellow out.

When i racked to secondary on 7-19, the bitterness may have eased a bit.  It also seemed a bit estery, probably due to the warm temps we’ve been having. My fermentation temp had been 78-80 *F, pretty damn high.