Rye-rish Red

We are fortunate enough to have a great semi-local brewpub in Indianapolis that does homebrew competitions from time to time. The competition that they recently announced is the "Rye Not" homebrew challenge. Basically you have to use at least 25% Rye malt in any beer style that you want. I decided to make an Irish red for this competition and based on the fact that I have to add rye malt and that I am clever as hell I am calling it Rye-rish Red. 

• 5 lb Marris Otter (40.4%)
• 3 lb Rye (24.3%)
• 2 lb Pale 2-Row(UK) (I had this laying around so I used it) (16.2%)
• 1 lb Munich (8.1%)
• 13 oz Caramel 30L (6.5%)
• 5 oz Roasted Barley (2.5%)
• 4 oz Caramel 120L (2.0%)
• 1 oz US Goldings FWH
• 0.5 oz US Goldings @ 5 min
• 1 tsp Irish Moss @ 15 min
• 1 tsp Fermax Yeast Nutrient @ 15 min
• 10 drops FermcapS before boil
• 1200 ml second generation Wyeast 1450 Dennys Fav starter

We have finally made it to spring and today was an awesome 70 degree day to do some brewing with the garage door open.

My mash tun likes to steal a good bit of heat from my strike water so I preheat it with 175 degree water and wait for it to fall to where I want it to be before adding grain. In this case that is 165 with a mash temp of 152 for one hour then batch sparge with two steps to get my pre-boil volume. The weather is so nice today that the fiance even made an appearance. Drained the tun onto the FWH and then batch sparged with about 5 gallons of 170 degree water and ended up with 6.5 gallons of wort.

One hour boil was uneventful and chilling went fine down to 71 degrees. The yeast was pitched and the fermenter went into the brew closet.

Efficiency went up on this batch, not sure if it was the sparge stirring help from the fiance or a different crush. Normally I am sitting around 60% but this time I hit 71% so the beer will be stronger than I intended since the OG came in at 1061. It would have been better to mash a bit hotter to bring the final gravity up but it may have ended up too sweet if I had done that. Anyway we will see in a couple of weeks how it tastes, the first sample had some rye spiciness so that is good.