When rice is mentioned in a recipe, should the weight be cooked rice or dry? And am I looking at a sparging nightmare? The recipe calls for .75 rice and .75 flaked maize. Of course I would use rice hulls. It also mentions mashing at 135 degrees for 30 minutes and 160 for 30. Never used a mash schedule with these highs and lows.
Thanks
I use flaked rice, otherwise the rice needs to be cooked, or cereal mashed.
Those mash temps will work if you have NA 2 row or 6 row as a base, and a fair amount of rice. Making a Bud clone?
I use rice in a lot of brews. I usually just use Minute (or other instant) rice and just chuck it directly from the box into the mash tun with the other grains…
To make things easy, I just use flaked rice. I’ve never tried Minute Rice, but I would imagine that it is pretty much the same thing as the flakes.
Has anyone out there used malted rice?
FYI it’s available at GlutenFreeHomeBrewing.org
I got some malted millet from them to try in a batch in the next week or two.
To answer the OP, it use the dry weight.
Thanks everyone. It’s an experiment on my end. Never used cooked rice and I want to see what happens. Making a Ballentine like ale.
Curious about minute rice and how much yield I can expect to properly estimate my OG. Anyone know?
Dry weight for rice whether flaked or uncooked.
Cooked rice provides a lot of sugar - more than instant/flaked from my experience. It’s also pretty easy to deal with as long as you make it a little mushy (and I like to break it down a little prior to adding to the mash, too); but it IS an extra pot to clean during your brewday (granted an easy one). An alternative to mushing it up after it’s cooked is to mill it prior to cooking; I find the the former to be easier for my process and I don’t have to adjust my mill gap.
Cheers and have fun! Let us know how your experience goes.
When I use Minute Rice, it’s right around 36 ppg.
You gave some great experience about preparing rice in my other thread. Thank you. It’s good to know that I should expect less yield from instant vs cooked rice. Any experience with brown rice?
Thanks. That’s what I happened to have in my recipe calculator. Any experience with brown rice?
Nope
No experience with brown rice but the bran is such a small percent of the rice grain that I can’t imagine too much of a difference in terms of yield, but with enough percent of the grist you may perceive a flavor difference.
When I use white rice, it’s well cooked (i.e. no little crunchiness left in the rice) and when broken down it gives nearly 100% yield. Each time I use rice in the mash you can see the bits and pieces swirling around in the mash when stirring things up and I always catch a few on a spoon to taste them (and feel them in my mouth). Every time it’s like they’re not even there; they’re just a hollow shell of their former self; tasteless and with no substance. Kind of like putting cotton candy in your mouth - where did it go?
Bob’s Red Mill states that rice bran (which includes the germ) constitutes 8% of the total weight of rice. More substantial than I initially thought.
http://www.bobsredmill.com/rice-bran.html
Since the bran and germ should not have any carbohydrates to convert then you can probably expect 8% less yield from brown rice to white rice; unless I’m overthinking this. In my case, I would estimate 92% extraction as opposed to the 100% I’ve been seeing with white rice. Granted, you should probably err on a percentage lower than that so you don’t overestimate your OG and come up too short.
As I understand it, a cereal mash is when you use a small amount of malt with the unmalted grain. This is for handling purposes, such as pumping the stuff around in an industrial scenario. The enzymes liquify the grain to an extent, and certainly make stirring easier and scorching less likely. Cooking the grain is just that - cooking it.
I use 40% brown basmati in a pilsener with Am. Lager yeast. It’s a very nice beer, and wholly unique. The rice character really comes through with a sort of dry, crisp bread aroma. I entered it as a CAP many years ago and got sub-par marks for an otherwise flawless, perfectly brewed lager. The character certainly threw off the tasters as they were expecting either a slight corn note, or a blank, transparent note from plain rice. Anticipating this, I also entered it in a specialty category and also received less than stellar scores. Bear in mind this dry and lighter lager would have been up against roasted jalepeno, seared mango porters and the like.
I’d definitely recommend playing around with unique rices. One trick is to cook the stuff the day before so you have it all ready to go during brew day. Remember that the cooled rice/grain will have a large effect on lowering mash temps. This messed up a mash of mine once when I started cooking the day before. No problem with using 40% rice. Use some hulls in there!
I would get around 35ppg from the rice. I don’t know how much of the bran/germ was intact in the stuff I used. There was enough to darken the lager out of the straw range, however.