Change Your Brewing Schedule To Match The Season

It's getting on towards the end of the cooler weather up here in the great northeastern United States and time to take a break from drinking our traditional cold weather beers for awhile. The warmer weather we've been having has me and lots of other beer lovers thirsting for some really golden refreshingly awesome summertime beers again. For me there's no better beer to fill this need than a nice cold citrusy American Wheat beer because they are perfect for drinking on a warm sunny day.

Screwer In The Rye Ale

I've got about half a corny keg of my Screwer In The Rye Ale left to drink until only fond memories remain of this amazing beer for a awhile. In order to keep up with the changing seasons now is the time to ramp up my wheat beer brewing schedule again so there's plenty of cold refreshing wheat beer on tap to keep up with the warm weather demand. It's clear to me that most beer drinkers like to drink light colored lower alcohol beers during the summer months and drink the dark higher alcohol beers during the cooler months of the year.

I know that's how I'm feeling now since this past fall and winter's brewing schedule included plenty of dark beers like Cascadian Dark Ale, Irish Stout and Brown Ale. Screwer In The Rye is very citrusy with a hint of flaked rye spiciness and just enough chocolate malt to give it a darker warmer color and my Yakima Valley clone is a deep dark citrusy high alcohol warmer upper best served during the colder months.

Summer Is Perfect For Drinking Wheat Beer

In contrast my 420 Special Wheat is light in color, citrusy with a slight hint of spice almost unnoticeable amount of coriander with a clean refreshing finish. Pitched and fermented using a decanted 2 liter starter made from second generation East Coast Yeast ECY10 - Old Newark Ale™ yeast I washed from a batch of beer fermented last month.

But the truth be told I am fascinated with the thought of reaching into my yeast library, grabbing a few vials of previously washed yeast and making up a nice starter from it to pitch into my next batch of beer. I know for a fact from brewing previous batches of wheat beer that ECY-10, ECY-12 and WLP-001 will all ferment a really great tasting American Wheat beer. Just be sure to toss in some citrusy hops and some bitter orange peel and you and your beer will be good to go.

Screwy's 420 Special Wheat

Drinking The Smokin' Oaked Rye

I've been enjoying this oak smoked rye beer for over a week now and I love it. Nearly every time I brew this recipe I change it up somewhat, even going as far as pitching different Lager or Ale yeast or adding American oak flavors to an already highly hopped beer. It still amazes me just how great freshly brewed and fermented beer tastes and it's awesome having the ability to brew yourself a perfect beer and love the way it tastes at will.

The recipe has finally evolved into what I can only describe as an incredibly interesting beer that's under 6% alcohol, best when moderately carbonated and served up in clean beer glass. There's that combination of flaked rye, pale and amber malts and lots and lots of Citra, Amarillo and Cascade hops that make up the base of the recipe. The addition of American oak chips to this aromatic beer adds subtle hints of vanilla and a slight toast flavor making it even more interesting than I would have thought possible had I not tried it..

I've brewed the same base recipe, 3 weeks in a row, I start out by emailing my grain bill to Princeton Homebrew and then taking home freshly crushed grains for the next days' brewing. Joe Bair has been crushing grains and brewing beer as long as homebrewing has been around, he also owns the LHBS, always provides great service and has the freshest ingredients available. I started washing and propagating yeast myself using yeast I bought from Princeton Homebrew, 'yeast so fresh you'd want to slap it', is what I'd order because the yeast I got there was often less than a month old.

Anyhow I thought I'd give you all an update on how much I liked my smoked rye ale, I know it's in a very unique category since I don't recall anyone marketing a citrusy hopped beer with oak and rye additions for extra flavor. There's even a some chocolate malt thrown in to deepen the beer's color. As I look back through my brewing notes reminding me that I had pitched the equivalent of a 4 liter starter into this beer for a fast really aggressive fermentation. This beer has great head retention and lacing, with a medium body and really well balanced finish it tastes so good I can't wait to keg my next batch.

Add Toasted Oak Chips To Your Next Beer

I finally decided to go ahead and add oak chips to my now fermenting Rye Ale, it's been a week since I brewed it and the primary fermentation completed quickly. Within 8 hours of pitching the yeast the airlock was bubbling away and a steady stream of StarSan bubbles flowed down onto the lid of the fermentor. I'm including a picture here of the inside of the fermentor to show how high the krausen rose inside the fermentor during the first week of fermentation, my best guess is the krauzen rose 6 to 8 inches high at it's peak.

Soaked 2 Ounces Of Toasted Oak Chip For 60 Minutes

The backbone of this 6.5% ABV beer is mostly all Pale Ale malt with much lesser amounts of Amber, Carapils, Chocolate, Crystal 60 and a bit of flaked rye for spice.  The recipe also called for a generous amount of American Yakima Valley hops added to the kettle at various times during the boil which produced beer with a lot a hop flavor and aroma. I'm very interested to find out how the oak flavors come through and how long it'll take to get just the right amount of flavor. I could let them soak for as long as 3 weeks but frequent sampling and tasting is the best way of getting just the right amount of oak while letting all those other high quality ingredients come through too.

Krauzen Ring Inside Fermentor After Aggressive Fermentation

 I guess until I get to add oak chips to my fermenting beers a few more times the whole process is going to seem a little awkward. The entire oaking process took most of the late morning on into early afternoon, although I did have time to organize my communications equipment and watch Archer on NetFlix too. I weighed out 2 ounces of American Oak chips and soaked them in water for about 90 minutes to prevent them from drying out and burning, this was on the advice of a very good cook familiar with using cedar when grilling.

Only The Chips On Left Were Toasted For 20 Minutes

 With the oaks chips spread out evenly on a sheet of aluminum foil put on top of the broiler grill I set the broiler timer to 20 minutes and after about 10 minutes I began to smell a faint smell of damp burnt wood fill the kitchen. I checked in to see how the toasting progress was going a few times to make sure there were no signs of smoke or flames. Towards the end of the 20 minutes the now toasted oak chips filled the entire house with a pleasing aroma of toasted American Oak chips.

Two Mesh Sacks Containing Weights And Boiled Oak Chips

I boiled the toasted oak chips in water for a good 10 minutes before cooling them down and putting them in the nylon mesh hops sacks with stainless steel hardware inside to keep them submerged under the beer. The mesh sacks worked a filters that strained and captured all the chips while I collected the now dark aromatic water in a sanitized bowl. I didn't want to risk infecting the rye beer with wild yeast and bacteria living on the oak chips and in the the process they got toasted, boiled and handled with sanitized utensils and bowls.

Electric Toaster Oven Set To Broil

 American Oak is said to add a light vanilla flavor to beer and I believe it will add some new and interesting flavors and aromas to just about any beer, when added in just the right amount. I'm dealing with multiple variables here to hit just the right balance including amount of oak chips, the length of time they come in contact with the fermented beer and the amount of toasting complexity the oak chips will add.



The amount of work that went into this recipe was about 3 hours or more than it would have taken to simply make a dry hop addition, but the aromas and flavors the oak will add to the beer are so different that it's completely worth it to me. This week the beer will be sampled often to check the hydrometer readings but to also taste the beer as the wood flavors begin to develop, this is going to be an awesome week.

I took a gravity sample and drank it the other day, the beer finished at 1.019 just a point off from my calculations and the first sample was yeasty so a real sense of this beer's taste won't come until bottling day. The fermentors in the refrigerator where I leave it to cold crash for another day or two while I decide to bottle it or keg it.  

Making A Starter From Harvested Yeast

Last month I brewed a version of my of my Screwer In The Rye Lager pitching two bottles of East Coast Yeast ECY12 - Old Newark Beer™ yeast into a five gallon batch. The recipe is all grain with a 1.060 original gravity and at 59F it fermented down to a 1.014 final gravity in just under three weeks time. The fermentation took off vigorously with a short lag time and the beer was a huge hit with those lager lovers lucky enough to sample it before it ran out.

 Early on bottling day I filled a 16 quart pot with about a gallon of filtered water, put the lid on it and let it boil for about 15 minutes to sterilize it. I removed the pot from the heat to cool off leaving the lid on, this water would be used to rinse the yeast out of the fermentor. Once I sanitized my bottles and bottling bucket I put the pot in an ice water bath to get the sterilized water equal to the beer temperature. I transferred the beer from the fermentor to the bottling bucket leaving just the trub in the fermentor.

Then I sanitized a long handled plastic spoon, glass half gallon pickle jar, four pint mason jars and the lids to get them ready for the next step. I poured a half gallon of the sterilized water directly on top of the trub in the fermentor and used the spoon to gently mix the water and trub together to get the yeast into solution. After a minute of gentle stirring I carefully poured the mixture in the fermentor into the pickle jar filling it up to the very top and screwed on the top. I set the pickle jar aside and went back to bottling up my beer.

Stratified Layers In ECY-12 And WLP007 Yeast

 The healthy yeast layer we're really interest in storing has a nice light creamy color and it is located just above the heavier trub/cold break layer at the bottom of the containers. The ECY-12 lager yeast on the left is a medium flocculent yeast so more cells will tend to stay in suspension longer than the highly flocculent WLP007 ale yeast on the right. When washing any strain of yeast it's important to harvest a good mixture of both the more flocculent and less flocculent cells in each type of yeast to assure your future fermentations will continue to attenuate as fully as the original strain. 

Mason Jars Filled With Washed ECY-12

Buy the time I was done bottling my beer the slurry in the pickle jar had started separating into separate layers, with the heavier hop particles and dead yeast cells settling out first at the bottom of the jar. The very top of the slurry had a thin layer of something and in between the two was the larger layer of yeast. I laid the four mason jars out in a line and filled each one up half way then went back to the first jar and topped them all off in the same order. What was left in the pickle jar was mostly all gritty looking trub that I washed down the sink after screwing the lids on the mason jars, labeling and putting them in the refrigerator.

Freshly Rinsed And Stored Yeast

 Fast forward to this past Friday morning when I started off my day by brewing up a 1.040 batch of wort to use in my starter and taking a mason jar of stored yeast out of the refrigerator to warm up. A half cup of light DME mixed in with 1200 ml of filtered water some old dry yeast and boiled for 15 minutes was all it took to get going. Once the wort and yeast were at the same temperature I sanitized my Erlenmeyer flask, funnel, stir bar and decanted off most of the water from the mason. I shook the yeast and water in the jar to break up the flocs, get all the yeast into solution and then poured it into the flask topping the flask off with the starter wort. I dropped in the stir bar, sprayed the top of the flask loosely covered the opening with a piece of sanitized tin foil and set the flask on the stirplate.

ECY-12 Yeast Starter Before Pitching

Several hours later a nice layer of krausen had begun to form on top of the starter which peaked around eight hours later. I left the starter spinning on the stir plate until I was ready to pitch it into my wort the next day. I began the making the starter on Friday morning and pitched into a batch of wort around 3:00 pm the next day as soon as the wort cooled to the same 60F temperature as the yeast. This time I remembered to hold the stir bar in place with a magnet so it didn't end up inside the fermentor for a few weeks. The wort from the flask smelled good, there were no off odors when I pitched it and the fermentation started quickly. I checked the air lock this morning and there was already activity from the Co2 being created from inside the fermentor.

Aerated Rye Wort With ECY-12 Starter

The fermentor is now safely tucked away inside my fermentation chamber where I'll keep a close eye on maintaining a 59F temperature throughout the fermentation. It'll be a few weeks before I get to taste the fermented rye beer and compare it to the first batch I brewed last month but judging from the 1.060 original gravity reading, color and the taste of the wort before pitching the yeast this batch is definitely off to a great start.

Screwy's Recipe 71 - Screwer In The Rye Lager

 For the past several weeks I had been thinking about brewing a Rye beer so I did quite a bit of research online reading everything I could find related to brewing beer using Rye malts. The styles of beer that I've been brewing lately have all tasted good and now that I successfully converted my extract recipes to all grain I was ready to brew something new. But before a I could create a new recipe I had to actually drink a Rye beer to get a sense of what a Rye beer tastes like. So one afternoon Mike brought over some Sierra Nevada 'Ruthless Rye' beers for us to try out and later that day a new beer recipe was born.

Chocolate, Crystal, Pale Malts And Flaked Rye Grains

We've been drinking Sierra Nevada Pale Ale for quite a few years by now and they were one of my favorite beers so I was happy to learn they just released a new style called Ruthless Rye made with rye malt. To us the new beer had mostly the same SNPA taste and flavor except at the very end when you could clearly taste the clean spiciness of the rye. The spicy character of the rye malt became less and less noticeable with every new sip of beer and when we had to switch back to drinking their Pale Ale we immediately knew we were drinking a different beer.

Sierra Nevada Ruthless Rye In Glass While Racking My Clone

The color of my Screwer In The Rye matched perfectly with the color of the Sierra Nevada Ruthless Rye we'd been drinking while transferring the cooled wort to the fermentor. Brewing a new experimental beer was very exciting for me and I took extra steps to make sure it would come out tasting as close as possible to the beer I was cloning. I spent a few hours over the course of the next week calibrating my brewing thermometer, which I found after a year of use had drifted 3-4F. I used qBrew to create the ingredient list of grains and hops I would be using and then put together the rest of my brewing plan and entered them into the batch notes and saved them.

Washing The Rice Hulls Prior To Adding To Mash

I found from my research that flaked rye is an adjunct and it should be used in a recipe in a similar way as flaked oats or flaked wheat to avoid stuck sparges. I also read in several threads where some brewers rinse their rice hulls under running tap water before putting them in the mash tun, while other brewers claimed there was no need to and they just poured them right into the mash tun. I've used rice hulls many times before when brewing my wheat beers and never rinsed them but for my first attempt at brewing the perfect Rye beer I decided to rinse them thoroughly before mashing them. It was clear to see that the rinse water used to clean the rice hulls did contain a whole lot of rice related debris and it took about three good rinses before it started to look clearer.

After Recirculating The Wort Sample Was 1.074

At the start of the lauter I recirculated the wort for about 30 minutes to setup the grain bed and get the wort running clear before adding it to the boil pot. I used a 60 minute single step infusion mash at 154F to prepare the wort and a fly sparge at 168F for 45 minutes to fill the boil pot. I always take a hydrometer sample at the very start and very end of filling the boil pot with wort. The temperature corrected readings for this rye beer were 1.074 and 1.032 respectively, which confirmed the conversion rate was good and there was no chance of extracting tannins caused by running off too much wort.

60 Minute Boil With Hop Additions

I'm a firm believer in first wort hopping now because I find myself using this method of increasing hop utilization in all of my beers now. It's pretty easy to do and the way I decided on is to take the bittering addition, which in this case called for a 60 minute boil, and just put it in the boil pot and let the wort flow through the hops until the pot is full. Since brewing this way I have never noticed any astringency or vegetable matter off flavors in any of the styles I've brewed using FWH additions not even in the really hoppy IPA styles. I put all the pellet hops I use in hop sacks and then remove them all just prior to cooling the wort down adding boiling water to the wort as needed to keep the pot full.

1/2 Tablet Of WhirlFloc Keeps The Cold Break Out Of The Fermentor

By using hops sacks to remove the hops after the boil and the addition of some WhirlFloc 10-15 minutes before flameout helps a lot in keeping the cold break inside the boil pot and out of the fermentor when racking the wort. I've found that reducing chill haze and producing a clear, clean tasting beer requires care during the lauter when recirculating the wort as well as using a fining agent to help settle the trub and using an autosiphon when transferring to the primary fermentor and bottling bucket.

Pouring East Coast Yeast's ECY12 Into Aerated Wort

Of course using good fresh yeast that provides the right attenuation and flocculation characteristics for the style of beer you're brewing is important to produce a great tasting beer that's both clear and clean tasting. After a good long boil any oxygen that was in the wort has been depleted and it has to be put back into the wort in sufficient quantities so that the yeast can load up their food reserves and multiply, keeping the lag and growth phases as short as possible. Once all the oxygen in the wort is used up by the yeast a healthy fermentation will begin with a vengeance and soon after the yeast will drop out of suspension further clearing the beer. Cold crashing the fermentor for a day before transferring the beer to a bottling bucket will also make the beer clearer and cleaner as more yeast will drop out of suspension before going into your kegs or bottles.

East Coast Yeast ECY12 - Old Newark Beer™ Fermented At 59F

The fermentor spent the next 3 weeks inside my fermentation chamber with the temperature of the fermentor held between 57-59F, a few days before bottling I let the temperature rise to 62F for a couple of days before transferring to my bottling bucket. The last five days in the primary fermentor is when I added my finishing hops and let them soak in the beer for five days, this last hop addition really brought this beer to life because the samples I drank during bottling had all the up front aroma that was missing at the end of the boil.

The Rye's Final Gravity Finished At 1.014

My latest Rye beer recipe is now been in the bottles and keg naturally carbonating since last Saturday and it will be ready for sampling in about another week and a half. Based on my initial impression of this recipe I have very high expectations since the rye flavors were noticeable but not cloying and the mouthfeel seemed as if it would be spot on once the carbonation levels were reached and the beer chilled to serving temperature. All in all my latest creation left me with a good feeling of accomplishment considering all the things that went into brewing this nice new beer and what could have gone wrong as in any new recipe but didn't. Now it's just a waiting game waiting for the yeast to add that nice soft natural carbonation to what already tastes like a remarkable beer.

Screwer In The Rye!

Today I got to drink my very first Screwer In The Rye Lager! It's been naturally carbonating for eight days and I put a few bottles in the refrigerator around 6AM this morning. I'm so excited, it's my first attempt at brewing a Sierra Nevada Ruthless Rye and I can't wait to try it cold and carbonated.

Screwer In The Rye Lager

 This beer is nicely carbonated, somewhere between an ale and a wheat beer, loaded with spicy aromas and clean tasting, absolutely delicious. The first thing I noticed when lifting the glass to take a sip was the nice rye aroma that gives you a hint of what's in store, followed by the unmistakably complex hop presence. It has a rich dark color with good mouthfeel, long lasting head retention and the blend of rye, malt and hop flavors and aromas are not at all cloying in any way.

Great Mouthfeel, Head Retention And Lacing

 Somewhat darker in color than a Sierra Nevada Ruthless Rye this very tasty rye beer has already become one of my favorites. I imagine paring this beer with any type of barbequed meats, steaks, ribs, burgers or chicken and it will stand up to and enhance their flavors perfectly without over powering them. If you're tired of brewing the same old pale ales and are looking to try a rye beer style go for it you won't be disappointed.

After making a few very minor tweaks in the grain bill I was able to brew this beer with just about the right color I wanted, this tweak is really more about aesthetics than anything else. The other change in my process involved pitching a 2 liter starter of East Coast Yeast ECY-12 that I had washed and propagated from my brew's original fermentation.

Screwer In The Rye Lager II

 This is a great tasting beer with a nice spicy rye aroma combined with just the right balance of rye and hop flavor to give the beer a clean satisfying finish. It's a nice variation of an IPA although there really is nothing pale about it but it is very hop forward with just the right amount of spice. The addition of the Crystal malt lends just the slightest hint of caramel sweetness and adds enough body, lacing and head retention to last from first sip to last.

I brewed this recipe again in June 2012 about four months after posting this original story and made several adjustments to the recipe. I switched out Crystal 10L for the Crystal 20L in the first recipe to get the color a little lighter and after removing the rice hulls completely the sparge still didn't stick. The next time I brew this recipe I have a couple of new tricks to try to get the color just a shade or two lighter yet.

Screwy In The Rye Version III