Rye 70/-

The product of my second SLC brewday was two session-strength beers, one Scottish and the other Belgian in origin.  Of course, that doesn’t mean either one was particularly to style.  The first was a Scottish 70 shilling (70/-); the other was a petit saison, on which I’ll post shortly.

For those who don’t know of it, the shilling system denotes alcoholic strength based on the historical price of the beer per barrel, with 60/- and 90/- being the common low and high ends, respectively (though Noonan’s book on the style mentions numbers low as 42/- and as high as 140/-).  According to Noonan, Scottish beers of previous centuries were related to their English counterparts, but leaned more toward the maltier end due to longer boil times (producing more melanoidins and thus more caramel flavours), higher final gravities, and reduced hopping rates.  There is some debate (see the comments at the bottom) as to how accurate this description is for historical Scottish beers; at least from a current American homebrewing standpoint (via the BJCP guidelines), calling a beer a 70/- denotes an amber, low-strength (under 4%), malty ale.

The big deviation from the Scottish norm here is that this beer was made entirely of rye malt; this and the beer that will go on this yeast cake are the principal reasons I bought a full sack of Weyermann rye when we moved to town.  The high viscosity and slickness of rye worts struck me as particularly fitting the heavier bodied, malt-forward nature of the style; in addition, the higher mash temperatures that encourage Scottish ale’s lower attenuation should also aid in keeping the rye proteins from becoming too sticky and causing lautering problems.

Scottish ale grists are often very simple; to keep with this but add some complexity to the beer, I toasted a pound of rye malt at home, half dry toasted for a biscuit-like style and the other half wet as “caramel” rye (which is actually sold as Cara Rye by Weyermann, I’ve since learned).  The flavour of these grains on their own was excellent: nutty and slightly sweet, respectively.  I’m looking forward to see how they taste in the finished product.  A touch of chocolate rye for colour, a modest bittering charge of hops, a fresh packet of Wyeast’s Scottish Ale yeast, and we were rolling.

This beer was originally supposed to be an even lighter 60/-, but my efficiency ended up much higher than expected (ridiculously high, actually; my refractometer still looks to be calibrated).  My past with the dreaded rye lauter has seen good, bad, and ugly, and the closest I have to a “trick” for rye-heavy mashes is to get the temperature way up before lautering.  Usually, I do two batch sparges; this time, I ran off whatever would come out on its own as first runnings, then brought my first sparge water to boiling and added it right into the mash for a mashout at 170F.  The lauter came off without a hitch, though slow as expected with such a viscous wort.

Primary fermentation kicked off quickly and subsided after just a few days.  Following a day agitating it at room temp to make sure it had finished out, it’s been crash cooling until tomorrow, when I’ll bottle it and put the next beer in the series, a Scotch ale (aka wee heavy), on the yeast.

Toasted Rye

Batch size: 4.75 gallons
Projected OG: 1.037
Projected SRM: 10
Projected IBU: 15.3
Boil time: 60 minutes
Brewhouse efficiency: 95%???

Grains
81.6% - 5 lb Rye
8.2% - 8 oz Caramel Rye (home-toasted)
8.2% - 8 oz Biscuit Rye (home-toasted)
2.0% - 2 oz Chocolate Rye

Hops
.5 oz Challenger (7.2%) (60 min)

Yeast
1 pkg WY1728 Scottish Ale yeast (no starter)

Water additions (mash)
4 qts RO water

Brewday: 2 October 2011
Mash-in: 9 qts @ 158F for 60 minutes
1st sparge: 10 qts @ 212F
2nd sparge: 10 qts @ 212F
Pre-boil volume: 6 gallons
Pre-boil SG: 7.9P (1.031)

Used the first sparge as a mashout to reach the proper temp to keep the rye from getting sticky.

Started in swamp cooler at 57F ambient; 60-65F once fermentation started

13 October 2011: Krausen dropped; brought to ambient (70F) for a day to make sure it was finished, followed by several days crash cooling

Bottled: 16 October 2011FG: 1.013 (1.014 @ 35F)
ABV: 3.1%

Bottled with 2.6 oz table sugar
Hydrometer sample tasted very watery, unfortunately