Black Ryeday

Today I brewed up batch #13, a rye beer. I had intended to brew Brevity Wit again, but the homebrew store was out of the appropriate yeast. So, I flipped through some brew magazines to get ideas and thought, hey, how about rye? I dreamed up some proportions, milled my grain twice, and was ready to go.

The Recipe:

7 lb 2-row pale malt
2 lb rye malt
1 lb flaked rye

11 AAU (24g @ 13% AA) Nugget @ 60
5 AAU (31g @ 4.5% AA) Willamette @ 15
4 AAU (37g @ 3% AA) Hallertau @ 5

1 Irish moss tablet @ 15 min

Wyeast 1272 - American Ale II

Mashed at 150° for an hour using about 14 quarts of water. Sparged with 170°-185° water until I had about 25 quarts for the boil.

O.G.: 1.062
Est. IBU: 57.0*

This beer is either a rye beer or an IPA; you could call it a hybrid. I'm just calling it a rye for my own purposes.

As I mentioned, I milled the grain twice just as I did last time; lo and behold, I hit 90% mash efficiency once again. The fine mill (plus, I have read, rye's natural properties) led to a very slow sparge of about an hour and fifteen minutes. Still, I'll take the extra time waiting in exchange for great efficiency any day.

I went with the name Black Ryeday because I bought the ingredients for this batch on the day after Thanksgiving, though the beer itself is not black in any way. The homebrew store was busier than I'd ever seen it, which I thought was weird, but at least it inspired a name.

Also, I racked Terrible Tripel to the secondary and measured its gravity at 1.005. If that ends up being the actual final gravity, we're talking 9.8% here. It tasted pretty good, too.

*Note: I just noticed (13 July 2010) that the AAU and IBU calculations were slightly off based on how many grams of hops I actually added at the 5 minute mark. Not sure how this happened or how I missed it for so long. This has been fixed; IBUs dropped by a paltry 0.8 units.