So last year, Jay and I looked into the quarterly competitions that Pearl Street Grill & Brewery in Buffalo holds. We even developed a recipe for the pumpkin ale competition and brewed it. Unfortunately early summer activities got the best of us and we never were able to enter it into the competition. I finally decided that enough was enough and that I would enter the Irish Style Red Ale competition and see how my own beer holds up.
Irish reds are numerous, especially around St. Patrick's Day, and I felt like I had to make my own version stand out a bit and encourage myself to try new things when homebrewing. When trying to think of something a bit more unusual, for some reason the one thing that first popped into my head was rye bread. Maybe I just eat too many rubens and diner breakfasts and so when I think of Irish, corned beef comes to mind, then the rye bread that comes with it. So, I just rolled with it and brewed a Rye-rish Red Ale. Using rye in a beer also allowed me to try a new technique since the rye I had available was raw rye which requires a separate cereal mash before normal mashing (to be discussed in another post). I have this in secondary fermentation right now and will be bottling it next week, but I figured I would also make a traditional Irish red, since I have quite a bit of time until the due date of March 31, 2011. I'll try and compare both, and whatever tickles my fancy the most will be entered into the competition.
So at the end of it all, I will have about 80+ bottles of Irish Red ale. Anyone having a St. Patrick's Day party?
Primary: American Pale Ale
Secondary: Rye-rish Red Ale
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