Description:

Adapted from 'Choco Red Rye Wedding Ale' in the November/December 2016 Zymurgy magazine (original recipe found on page 94). To get the first question out of the way....there is NO red rice in this recipe. The 'Rye' in the original title did not seem to apply, so I changed it to 'Rice', but it was not red rice! The challenge of this recipe is the 4 OZ English brown malt which is described as a dark roasted flavor with some bitterness, and has a Lovibond of 60 - 70. My thought was to use 4 OZ James' Brown Rice Malt which has a Lovibond of only 22, and pitch in 2 OZ of Dark Rice Malt to bump up the SRM. This gets the recipe closer to the 14 SRM of the original recipe. If you pitched 4 OZ of the Dark Rice Malt you would actually achieve 13.5 SRM. My concern is that the beer may go too bitter. Another option is to use Medium Roasted Millet Malt in place of the James' Brown Rice Malt. But my experience with these malts leads me to believe the James' would better offset the dark malt, and there is not that substantial difference is color between the two. The other substitution was using Biscuit Rice Malt in place of a wheat malt. Lastly, the LME / syrup was bumped up by 0.6 LB to get to the desired OG.

7.17.19 Update from JP Bierly Owner / Brewer at Bierly Brewing in McMinnville Oregon:
We brewed this recipe using the prescribed grain bill, but we deviated on the hop schedule in favor of slightly more traditional English hops: East Kent Goldings and Fuggle hops. The grain bill comes in at just over a pound in weight for a five gallon batch so it made it very easy to use our 2 gallon mini mash tun (built by GFHB) with its 4 pound capacity. When we brew this recipe again, we’ll probably bump the grain bill up to ~3 pounds and brew a half barrel batch still using the mini mash tun! Our customers loved this beer! With the hop modification, it was true to the style of an Irish Red. Head retention wasn’t fantastic, but we’re working on this. While the taste was spot on, the color was less than red. We’re considering reducing the sorghum and adding a bit of D-45 Candi syrup to the recipe to correct this problem in our next batch. It’s tricky because the flavor was perfect, but the color was not owing to the difference in achievable colors when comparing roasted rice and millet malts to traditional roasted barley malts. Overall, we would brew this recipe again, in fact, our customers have demanded it. 

Ingredients:

• 6.6 LBS Gluten Free LME (liquid malt extract) or Sorghum Syrup
• 8 OZ Biscuit Rice Malt
• 4 OZ Chocolate Millet Malt
• 4 OZ James' Brown Rice Malt
• 2 OZ Dark Rice Malt
• 0.75 OZ Mt. Hood Hops
• 1 OZ Tettnang Hops
• 0.5 OZ Cascade Hops
• 0.33 OZ Galaxy Hops
• 0.33 OZ Citra Hops
• 0.33 OZ Simcoe, Magnum or Summit Hops
• American Ale Yeast

Additional Instructions

Primary Ferment: 7 days
Secondary Ferment: 7 days

Beer Profile

Original Gravity: 1.053
Final Gravity: 1.013
Alcohol by Vol: 5.2%
Color SRM: 11.1
Bitterness IBU: 32.0
Recipe Type: partial mash
Yield: 5.0 Gallons

Procedure:

Source: Adapted from November/December 2016 Zymurgy magazine