Beer Forum

I think I saw a rye cream posted here a while back. I have a pretty decent (I'm happy with it at least) APA, American Brown, Wee Heavy, and Stout that I'm happy with. Dialing them in, but I want to add a lighter-drinking, more quaffable ale to the rotation that my custo.... friends seem to desire.

Basic strat:

4# 2-row
4# pilsen
1# corn
1# rye
8 oz carapils
152 F mash
75 min boil (little DMS)
1 oz mt hood @ 60
1 oz willamette @ 20
1 oz mt hood @ 5

Wlp-001 @ 64 ferment.

Anyway, this looks like it oughta hit about 1.050 (ish) and ferment pretty dry. I might try to ferment it with Pacman instead of Calale.

I'll probably be running something like this in a week or so, so any advice is welcome.

That is pretty much the base recipe for my house beer. It works really nice. I've played a lot with different yeasts. The cal ale and pacman are pretty clean and let the corn and rye shine through. I've used a kolsch yeast on it and you would swear that it was a lager. The German ale yeast is delicious in this (especially when using saaz for the later hop additions) but it takes forever to clear.

My latest variation got away from lighter drinking target you are going for. I used all Munton's Maris Otter for the base malt and then fermented with a scottish ale yeast. That keg disappeared way too fast. It had a strong malt backbone but still finished dry.

The recipe you gave is ripe for all sorts of variation. Don't be afraid to have fun with it.

Wayne

Aha! That's right- I am pretty darn sure I was inspired by discussion of your beer, Bugeater. Looking forward to brewing this, It'll be nice to have something like this under my belt when the weather warms up (as much as can be expected in SF).

Oh, one last thing- do you do a protein rest when you brew this? There's a lot of back-and-forth about protein rests with pilsen malts. I'm leaning toward: "probably", since I've never actually done that kind of thing before and it would be nice to learn a new technique. But then again, that's just another way for me to screw something up.

The rye and pilsen malts have more proteins than the 2 row and the corn. I'd go with about a 15 minute protein rest just for that.

HTH-

That looks delicious. That's a lot of hops though. But I'm not one to subscribe to the West Coast idea that beers should be Liquid Hops in a Glass. I recently brewed a cream ale with San Fran Lager yeast at 68°F. I was scared about infection because of the yeast odors, but it turned out great. Make sure you use flaked corn in the mash however.

On the one hand, I was leaning toward the "pre-prohibition cream ale" style, which is usually fairly hoppy (35 IBUs I believe). On the other hand, the whole point with this beer is to make something more quaffable. So I'll probably dial it down a bit, probably cut the mt. hood in half in each addition (so 1 oz of each willamette and mt. hood total).