Rye Pale Ale

It has been 3 months since my last brew day.  I have been really eager to get back to it.  I am finally settled in enough in PA to start brewing again.  Just in time too because I'm starting to get lower than I'd like on beer.

The Philadelphia area has many things going for it that I've discovered so far:

• Much better access to European beers
• Some really great breweries (Victory, Tired Hands, Stoudts, Yards . . . )
• A great home brew store - Weak Knee
• Cooler weather and a basement in my house to help with fermentation and long term conditioning

Before my move I was feeling like the process was getting easier and easier with each batch.  Now, between the long break and starting up again in a new place I'm thinking I might have taken a couple steps back.  So, for this batch I'm going to have to knock some rust off and pay some special attention to make sure I don't miss any important steps.  Hopefully nothing will get too screwed up.

I want to start getting a better feel for the many ingredients available to home brewers to try to speed my way to a point where I'm comfortable making my own recipes.  So far I've brewed with barley, oats, and wheat.  I've decided it's now time to try my hands at rye.  I chose this recipe from homebrewtalk which is about 20% rye.  I've really liked the rye beers I've had in the past - it has a very interesting flavor that gets along really well with hops.  This recipe is very hoppy.  To get a better sense for the contribution of the rye it might be interesting to brew this with only barley somewhere down the road.

I am also trying my hands at a new yeast - Wyeast 1272 American Ale II (also my first time with the Wyeast slap pack).  As I progress with brewing I'm coming to understand that the benefits of the huge selection of yeasts provided by White Labs and Wyeast justifies the added effort associated with building up a starter - I'm getting pretty board of S-04, US-05, and Nottingham dry yeasts at this point.  It's exciting to have all these options of yeasts available to me now that I've come to that realization.  To that end, and as a reward to myself to not brewing in so long, I purchased an Erlenmeyer flask and a Stir Plate.

I'm looking forward to the next few months of broadening my horizons and of drinking more home brew.

Recipe Details:

• Grain:
• 8 lbs 2 Row
• 2 lbs 8 oz Rye
• 1 lb Munich
• 8 oz Victory
• 3 oz Acid Malt
• Hops:
• 1 oz Magnum (Pellet, 14.3% AA) at 60 min
• 1 oz Fuggle (Pellet, 5.3% AA) at 30 min
• 0.5 oz East Kent Goldings (Pellet, 7.2% AA) at 20 min
• 0.5 oz East Kent Goldings (Pellet, 7.2% AA) at 10 min
• 1 oz Cascade (Pellet, 7.1% AA) at 0 min
• 1 oz Cascade (Pellet, 7.1% AA) Dry Hop
• 1 oz Columbus (Pellet, 16.3% AA) Dry Hop
• Yeast:
• Wyeast 1272 American Ale II
• Water:
• 10 gal Spring water
• 1 tsp Calcium Chloride
• 1 tsp Gypsum
• 1 tsp Irish Moss at 20 min

Process Details:

• Batch Size:
• 6 gal
• Mash:
• 154 F for 60 min
• Boil:
• 60 min
• Fermentation Temp:
• 64 F

Results:

• OG:
• 1.048 (Target 1.052)
• Efficiency:
• 65% (Target 71%)
• FG:
• 1.006 (Target 1.011)
• Apparent Attenuation:
• 87% (Target 78%)
• ABV:
• 5.51% (Target 5.38%)

Brewing Notes:

• 9/26/14 - Prepared a yeast starter.  For the yeast starter size calculations I used this tool - Yeast Pitch Rate and Starter Calculator.  My slap pack was about 1.5 months old so I ended up building a 1.2 L starter with PA tap water and 4 3/8 oz of DME to get 1.036 gravity wort.  I was able to boil the starter in my new Erlenmeyer flask which saved me the sticky step of pouring from a pot.  Activated the yeast and let the starter cool down to 95 F in the fridge before adding them.  Got a nice whirlpool going on the stir plate.  Here is what it looked like the next morning:

• 9/28/14 Brew day - 6:00 AM to 11:00 AM including setup and cleanup
• Added CaCl and Gypsum to 5 gal of water
• Heated 5 gal of strike water to 177 F (assuming 10 F lost to the mash tun)
• Added 15 qt of water to mash tun for a 1.25 ratio of water to grain
• Let the mash tun temperature settle for 10 min - target is 167 F - ended up at 166 F so just about on target
• Added grain and stirred in to eliminate dough balls - I was shooting for 154 F but the mash ended up at 150 F.  Added a gallon of 180 F water to increase the temperature.  This took about 15 min and got the temperature up to 156 F - close enough.

• After 50 min ran the iodine starch conversion test - conversion appears to be complete
• At the end of the 60 min the mash was at 152 F
• Added 5 gal of mash out water at 185 F (which brought the mash temp to 162 F), stirred, let settle for 5 minutes, vorlaufed, and then drained (I am currently operating with only one pot - need to get a second one to make a dedicated HLT).

• Ended up collecting 8.5 gal of wort.  Measured the gravity at 1.031 at 83 F.  Per my hydrometer calibration this is actually 1.035.  This is 68% efficiency.  This was close enough to not take any action.
• Brought the 8.5 gal of wort to a boil - this took 15 min.
• Waited for the hot break to subside before adding the 60 min hops.  Had a higher than normal hot break - wonder if that could be due to the rye.

• Added the 30 min hops
• At 20 min added more hops and the Irish moss
• Added 10 min hops
• At flame out added the 0 min hops - performed a 15 min hop stand
• Sanitized the wort chiller by adding to the near boiling wort post flameout.  I believe leaving it in there for the hop stand will be sufficient to sanitize the chiller.  This is a change to my previous process to avoid the problem I had with the Strong Brown Ale where I hadn't boiled off enough wort to get to the correct OG but didn't realize it until the wort had been chilled (using the sight glass to determine the extra displacement from the chiller just proved to be unfeasible).  Had I known prior to chilling I could have continued the boil to correct the situation.
• Chilled the wort down to ground water temps (64 F) which took 30 min - big time savings compared with AZ.

• Transferred wort to fermentor.  Used the hop sack to filter out the spent hops and maximize wort collection.  Probably transferred a lot of break material as well.
• Collected 6 gal of wort.  Measured final gravity as 1.046 at 68 F which is 1.048 per the temperature calibration.  This is 65% efficiency which is okay with me.
• Poured the wort between two sanitized fermentors a few times to aerate.  This warmed the wort a bit - ended up at 68 F.
• Moved to the fermentation chamber to chill down to 62 F
• Once it got down to 62 F pitched the entire 1.2 L yeast starter and increased the fermentation chamber to 64 F.  Set up the fermentor with a blowoff tube as the bucket is pretty full.
• 9/29/14 - Good krausen build up the day after pitching.  This yeast strain produces a pleasant aroma (almost a vanilla smell.  I think I used the wrong lid to the fermenter as it doesn't produce a very good seal.  No bubbling in the airlock as a result.
• 10/2/14 - Still have good layer of krausen.  Increased the fermentation temperature to 68 F (basement temperature) to help it finish up.
• 10/11/14 - Added the dry hops in a hop sack
• 10/17/14 - Removed the dry hop sack and reduced the fermentation chamber down to 35 F for the cold crash
• 10/18/14 - Added gelatin for fining.  What appears to be black mold has accumulated on the outside of the fermentor where I had spilled some wort.  Doesn't look like it's made its way into the beer fortunately.

• 10/19/14 - Bottled the batch with 4 5/8 oz of priming sugar for 2.4 vol of carbonation.  Ended up with 5.25 gal of beer which got me 56 12 oz bottles.  Measured final gravity at 60 F as 1.006 which is a bit lower than I'd expected.  The beer is really hoppy at this point with a firm bitterness - I could call this an IPA and nobody would argue.  The dry finish doesn't really detract.  I do get the spiciness in the finish that I expected from the rye as well.  It's a very tasty beer - one of the best I've brewed so far.
• 11/30/14 - Tasting Notes - this one turned out very well.  Really nice balance between hops and spicy rye.  It makes for a great, easy drinking, flavorable beer
• 4/2/15 - Drank my last bottle of this beer today.  It still had some nice hop flavor to it after 5 months.  I will miss this one.

Lessons Learned:

1. Brewing in PA is going to be okay.  The one painful thing about the brewday was that I keep all my equipment down in the basement so I had to make many trips to bring in up and down and the start and end of the day.  Not sure there's anything to be done about that at this point.
2. I was about 52 F when I started brewing this morning.  I lost a lot more heat doughing in than I did in PHX.  I need to compensate for that a bit more - especially as it gets colder out.
3. I liked the process change to add the chiller after flameout.  The water stayed at ~200 F for the entire 15 min hop stand - no infection could survive in that so I think it was sufficient to sanitize.
4. I think my efficiency may have been negatively impacted by the single mash out sparge.  I really need to get myself a dedicated large volume HLT.
5. It would also be nice to figure out a way to chill the post mash gravity sample a bit quicker.  I just put the sampling tube in the freezer and it took about 30 min to get the sample down to the 80s.  If I could have gotten this sample quicker, and I had a HLT with some spare sparge water, I could have done another batch sparge to get a bit more sugar off the grain.
6. The rubber washers on my sight glass are starting to fall apart - need to develop a longer term solution.