Last night, I bottled my Ramsauer Roggenhelles, a traditional Austrian-style rye lager beer.
This is my leftovers, that didn’t fill a bottle. You can see the color nicely. (It’ s not really that cloudy. The beer was in the low 30’s, and the lower part of the bottle is sweating.)
I mentioned that this is a traditional Austrian-style lager. The use of rye in beer was outlawed by the Reinheitsgebot, or German purity law, which took effect in 1516 in Bavaria and in 1817 throughout the German Empire. Rye was not reintroduced to German brewing until 1988. Traditional German ryes were basically a Bavarian style, so it had been nearly 5 centuries, and German ryes are a new invention, not a traditional style.
Meanwhile, no such law existed in Austria; ryes there are far more diverse and part of an unbroken tradition. (The Reinheitsgebot was disastrous for the diversity of the German brewing industry in general, and conservative estimates have it that Austria brews three times as many styles of beer as Germany, despite having one-tenth of the population.) A light rye like this one would not be found in Germany today, but it’s certainly a part of the Austrian milieu.
I’ve never brewed with rye before, so I deliberately kept this recipe simple to showcase it and learn about it. It’s 60% rye, and the balance is basically pilsner malt. The hops are German nobles, and the profile is malty. The water is hard, like in the Austrian Alps. I fermented it with White Labs’ Munich Helles Platinum strain. “Hell” means bright, “Rogge” means rye, and Ramsau is a town in Austria that happens to alliterate. So, the name means “Ramsau bright rye beer.”
The rye is quite distinctive, drier than barley and a little spicy. Since I bottle condition, what I’ve tasted was flat, but it’s really interesting. It has surprisingly little front-end flavor, but the carbonation will improve that. The midpalate is dominated by the rye spiciness, and the finish is intensely malty, in a doughy kind of way. I think it’s going to be pretty awesome when it’s ready.
I learned a lot about brewing with rye, and in fact, I ran into a major crisis while brewing. Rye is really sticky, and I got a badly stuck sparge. Alas, that meant a lot of the sugar stayed in my doughball, and didn’t make it into the wort, so the batch came out at a very light 2.7% abv. Interestingly, the flavor is fine; the beer doesn’t taste thin at all, and the hops somehow stayed balanced. Maybe I had more success getting non-fermentable flavor components out than sugars, or maybe rye is actually really intense, and I haven’t quite captured that. The hop flavor coming in right makes me think the former is more likely than the latter. In any case, lots of rice hulls in the mash next time!
I like the rye flavor a lot. My next project is a Scottish Wee Heavy, and I think I’m going to include some rye malt in it.
This was a fun experience, and I’ll post a full set of tasting notes next week, when it’s all ready.
homebrewdude 