CUJO SPICE v. 2.0 – pumpkin rye beer

Dave attacks the mash tun. Much easier to clean outside during the summer!

Wow, I haven’t clicked the “brewing” category when posting to this blog in so long… Earlier this week, I had thought about all the “work” that goes along with brewing and was a little dismayed by the thought of kicking things into gear again. That all changed when I walked into the grain room at the brew shop and was hit by aroma of malted barley. Mmmmmm. I immediately got excited to be getting back into the swing of things.

Here’s the recipe for my 2011 Halloween brew:

Base: 7.75 lbs. American 2-Row (Rahr), 3.5 lbs. Rye malt (Weyermann), 1.75 lbs. light Munich malt (Weyermann)
Specialty: .29 lbs. Crystal malt 50-60L (Simpson’s), .28 lbs. flaked wheat
Hops: 1.0 oz. Mt. Hood  pellets (60″), 1.0 oz. Argentine Cascade pellets (2″)
Yeast: White Labs WLP001 California Ale Yeast (1600 ml yeast starter, 1 c light DME)
Irish moss (15″), yeast nutrient (10″), 1 tsp. nutmeg and 1 tsp. cinnamon (2″)

Unlike last year, this year’s CUJO SPICE recipe is a rye beer with a small addition of pumpkin spice rather than a straight up pumpkin ale. I thought about including actual pumpkin like last year, but worried that in conjunction with the rye would produce a beer so cloudy it would never achieve clarity. I don’t think the actual pumpkin adds a lot of flavor to a pumpkin beer anyway. It’s mostly the spices you end up tasting. I used a bit less spice this year to give the rye flavor the opportunity to mix and meld harmoniously with the pumpkin spices. We’ll see how it turns out. 

Dave cleaning out the mash tun, and check out the hop bine progress in the background. Don't worry, a full hop crop update is forthcoming!

There were some problems on brew day with mash efficiency again. I’d brought this issue up at my last NBA meeting and someone asked where I buy my and mill my grains. When I responded with “primarily Midwest Supplies,” he said that their grain mill often is set incorrectly, under-milling the grains. He suggested running them through twice, so I tried that. Also, during the sparge, I made sure to go pretty slow but yet again the pre-boil OG was around 6 brix by the time we got close to 5 gal. of wort. My buddy Dave was over to help on brew day and had a cool suggestion to run some of the wort back through the grain bed to see if it could pick up some more sugar. We did that as well as loaded up the mash tun with more hot water and let it all sit for about 20 min. while we ate lunch (and enjoyed some homebrew). That seemed to work, bringing pre-boil OG up to 9 brix by the time we once again collected 5 gallons. We kept going until we’d collected a little over 6 gal. and tested the brix level of the mash, which was by that time down to 4 so we decided to cut it off and start on the boil.

Fermentation became very active by late Saturday evening. A good start!

Rye is very oily in nature, so we had a small boil-over after leaving the kettle unattended for about 10 min. as it reached the initial boil. We lost a little volume there, but not more than a quart at the most. The full boil ended up lasting roughly 80 min. and we were battling flame-outs and boil-overs almost the entire time. In the future, I need to employ a trick I’ve seen: have a spray bottle ready to spray down the top of the boil with water, which helps break up the surface area of the bubbles and staves off boil-overs without turning down the heat.

When all was said and done, I think we maybe collected 3.5 or 4 gal. with an OG of 15 brix (1.061). We should have collected about 7.5 gallons up front and shortened the boil time more than we did (90 min. was recommended for this rye beer…). But then it would have just been a weaker version of the product. Probably could have also watered it down post-boil to bring up the volume, but didn’t want to spend the time boiling and cooling water at that point and again, didn’t really want to dilute the product.

I may try this exact recipe again in the coming weeks to 1) get more of what I anticipate will be a really unique, flavorful beer and 2) buy and mill the grains at Northern Brewer to find out if it’s my system or Midwest Supplies’ mill that is making my efficiency so horrible. It’s probably some combination of both, but I’m interested in seeing how much of a difference it makes.