Experiences of brewing with rye

We had a successful brew day yesterday, making our Rye Beer Experiment.

We used 30% rye malt and 70% barley malt – from what I’ve read this is a fairly high proportion, but we wanted to get a feel for what it tastes like so risked pushing it.

So what did we learn? Well the first thing I was warned about was getting a stuck mash. This is where the grain in the mash tun becomes to gloopy to allow the sparge water to pass through properly. Rye has much less husk than barley, which means it is prone to becoming a big sticky mess that won’t allow water through it (think porridge). However, despite the warnings our mash/sparge ran completely normally.

Then it comes to the boil. It seems that rye is much higher in protein than barley, and this really showed itself during the boil. Proteins precipitate out during the boil process: an effect known as the hot break. Last night’s hot break was huge -  we had great big clumps of stuff the size of cornflakes floating around in the boil, as you can see below.

Andy skimmed quite a lot of the scum off the boil too, as you can see below.

Finally, getting the wort out of the boiler into the fermenter was something of a challenge. My new boiler has a filter at the bottom, as shown below.

I don’t have a photo of it, but the filter mesh was utterly clogged up with break material (the precipitated proteins). I had to sanitise a little brush and scrub at the mesh to help the wort to get through. (Sorry, no photo of that – too busy with it!).

So all in all, it doesn’t bode well for a clear beer. Those proteins are bound to leave a lot of haze. But hopefully it will be an interesting (and tasty!) beer nonetheless.