Should I cook and use regular rice or just use flaked rice? If I use regular rice should I adjust my mash water since the rice won’t absorb additional water?
If you have not seen it, there is a Rice lager saison article on scottjanish.com from Dec 12th. They used raw rice in a multiple rinsing process.
I prefer flaked adjuncts for the simplicity of not having a separate step, and the ease of figuring grist and water quantities. If it’s not readily available or is ridiculously expensive from your supplier, I have also heard of people using Minute Rice with great success. The pre-cooking process apparently makes it very porous, so the starch is more easily available than with plain rice, although you would still “cook” (rehydrate really) it before adding to the mash. I’ve never tried it myself, like I said, I’m a flake fan.
So I don’t brew with rice but I do make rice wine (which is a beer) but has a very different mashing process. In traditional rice wine making, you rinse the rice until the rinsate is clear, soak for an hour (I usually invert the first two steps) and then steam until the rice rather than boiling so that the rice doesn’t stick together so much, but you’ll still have to declump it manually after cooling. Stop steaming when there is no white core when you cut open the rice kernel.
Alternatively, you could boil in so much water that you end up with rice soup, maybe 4 parts water to 1 part rice. I’ve done that with oatmeal to fully gelatinize the oatmeal for higher mash efficiency. I would probably go with this approach. For estimating the amount of water you are adding to the mash, you could soak rice overnight, rinse/drain and then add a measured amount of water.
What Scott Janish describes appears to be the normal way of cooking rice and then adding to mash.
I guess I wouldn’t adjust mash volumes unless you are adding rice with liquid water to the mash or unless your rice is >15% of the grist.
A note about rice: Long grain rice wlll ferment out pretty completely. Glutinous rice, e.g., sushi rice, will provide body.
I use Minute Rice, right into the mash.
Good to know! Works just like flakes then, but cheaper! That will make it my future choice for rice.
Gee, I thought that was well known! Sorry to have never mentioned it before.
I think I forgot about this. Any worries of a stuck mash? I will be using a considerable amount so some rice hulls might be in order.
It seems kind of ironic to buy rice that has had the hull removed and then buy rice hulls and mix them together. It is like buying nonfat milk and cream and mixing them to get whole milk.
From what I understand, this can be done with other grains and skip the cereal mashing. I have heard this about spelt, rice, quinoa, teff, millet, and other grains.
Can anyone confirm that by cooking the grain, then adding it to the mash, you can skip the cereal mash and still get the same effect?
Sorry about being slightly off-topic.
I don’t think I’ve ever gone over 20% and never had a problem. But it depends on your lauter design, and mine has never had a stuck runoff with anything, so I don’t worry about it. If yours is prone to sticking you might want some hulls.
That basically is a cereal mash.
Thanks. I usually don’t have an issue but 20% rye gave me problems recently. I planning on over 30% rice.
In a cereal mash using 5-10% of the malt (or bacterial alpha amylase,) alpha amylase liquefies the adjunct by attacking the amylopectin skin of the gelatinized starch granules. This not only keeps the adjunct mash from becoming a gloppy, harder to handle and incorporate, mess, but also opens up the adjunct starch making it fully available for conversion. It is possible to skip this and just boil the adjunct, if you don’t mind handling the gummy mass and don’t mind the reduced availability of the starches. It is probably of less concern to homebrewers, who are not trying to pump their cereal mash and can accept reduced yield and efficiency, than to commercial brewers.
Exactly. Simply cooking the adjunct is fine for us.
There are other options like malted rice and rice extract.
Check out “Experimenting with rice” in the March/April 2018 BYO.
Thanks Rob. I appreciate the explanation.
I knew about minute rice from reading about it somewhere.
I don’t mind doing cereal mashes.
I used 16% flaked rice and it went from 1.040 to 1.007. This was just a test using US-05. Going to use a lager yeast sometime this spring.
Rye is a whole different breed of cat from rice, especially when it come to gumming things up.
Glad to know about minute rice, I probably would have never thought of it. I don’t care to do cereal mashes unless there is a specific reason too as to me they are a PITA. The last time I did one was to see if Red rice would contribute anything to the color of the finished beer, it didn’t. One of these days I’ll get around to trying Black rice, I’m pretty sure it’ll have an effect, but that’s a project that’s easy to keep procrastinating on.