Stove Made RyePA

Stove Made RyePA By Pete Ricks If you have ever had a great rye beer then you probably understand why rye is such a popular addition to so many great beers. Joe Bob Grisham at Bandersnatch in Tempe, Arizona brews some great rye beers. Derek Osborn at BJ's Brewery in Chandler, Arizona won a medal at the 2002 GABF for his Juniper Rye beer, which I heard was interesting. Another great professionally brewed rye beer is the Hop Rod Rye Seasonal Ale brewed by Bear Republic out of California. This beer was reviewed in a homebrew magazine this year and a great homebrew recipe was also provided. For all grain that is. The article didn't offer an extract recipe for this beer because, as the author stated, they don't make rye malt extract. While this is true, it got me thinking about how to duplicate this beer without doing a full mash. As you can see from the picture at the top of this article, I placed the grains is a crusty old grain bag that I scrounged up somewhere and placed it in the brewpot. I added a gallon and a half of water and also a half gallon of wort that I had sparged earlier that day from an all grain batch of Pale Ale. I raised the temp up to 150 and held it there for an hour. After an hour, I raised the temp to 168 degrees for 15 minutes to mash out my mini mash. The grain bag that I used was pretty lame as I ended up with a fair amount of grain in my mini mashed wort. So I ran it through a strainer to take care of that problem. What I ended up with was about a gallon of slick, viscous rye malt extract. So far, so good. I then added the rest of the pale ale wort that I had sparged earlier, 6 lbs of Alexander's Pale Malt Extract, and .75 lb of Briess pale dry malt extract. I backed off of the hops a little as this beer wasn't going to be as high gravity as a beer like Hop Rod Rye. For bittering, I used an ounce of Magnum that had been laying around for a month or so. I then added in generous additions of Centennial pellets thoughout, followed by some Cascade at the very end. This beer was also fry hopped with a half ounce of Centennial and Cascde each. You can find all the recipe data in the beerdude.com recipe database. Just look under partial mash IPAs. This beer fermented for 6 days before I racked it into a secondary with teh dry hops. I then chilled it down to the low 30s and racked it into a keg. As expected, the beer had a nice extract twang up front when I first tasted it, but it also had some nice malt aromas. So was this beer as good as the all grain version? I don't really know. My first attempt at the all grain version ended in a stuck mash and eventually, an infected beer. The Hop Rod Rye will be one of the first beers that I brew when I'm able to brew all grain again, and this time, I will definitely remember those rice hulls. On my first attempt at the all grain version of Hop Rod, I had this feeling that I had forgotten something as I was watching my sparge slow down to a trickle. Of course it finally dawned on me that I had completely forgotten to add the rice hulls to my recipe when it was too late. Such is the life of a homebrewer. But back to the extract version of this beer. It is still aging and the extract twang is fading but this beer does not have near the hop profile that I was expecting. Not a bad beer for an extract and it has a pretty good mouthfeel from the rye. If I was going to brew it again, I would use more of the Briess dried malt extract to kick up the ABV and probably add more finishing hops. So while there is no such thing as rye malt extract for homebrewers, as you can see from this article, it is pretty easy to make your own.