I know it’s already Thursday but some very cool stuff happened over the weekend that I need to talk about. And it isn’t the Giants game. Because I’ll be honest with you people out there in the blogosphere…I don’t care about football. What I care about is good food and good drink. And while the Giants were duking it out with the Packers for a shot at the Super Bowl I was finishing up a rye ale.
Before I get to that, though, I’d like to talk about a local brewery. Sixpoint Craft Ales is a little operation out in Red Hook, Brooklyn. I first tried their Righteous Ale on tap at Bar Americain, Bobby Flay’s restaurant by Times Square. My brother-in-law, who happens to be the beverage director at said restaurant, recommended it and he was spot on. It was a fantastic beer, rich and spicy with a great punchy finish. I had never had a rye beer before so I had no basis of comparison. It was just really good. Fast forward to last week when the BiL asks if I’d like to join him on a trip out to the Sixpoint brewery and maybe snag some yeast for the homebrew. Obviously I couldn’t say no.

The guys out there are awesome. They’re just some homebrewers that hit it “big” and it was great to hang out and talk beer with them. I brought them some of my brews to sample – a pale ale and an oatmeal stout. The reviews were positive overall but obviously I still have a lot of improvements I could make. I also got to sample a stout right out of the conditioner, which was excellent. In the end I managed to leave with a gallon jug of yeast from the bottom of a still fermenting IPA, a few pounds of rye and a head full of advice and new ideas. Many thanks go out to Aaron and the crew at Sixpoint for their generosity and their delicious beer. If anyone reading this has a chance to try some I highly recommend it. Thanks also go out to my brother-in-law for hooking me up with these guys.

So let’s move on to Sunday. Some friends come over to brew a rye ale. I formulate a recipe that looks much like my pale ale but with some rye in it. I figured it was a good place to start. The brew day was long but more or less uneventful. No rice hulls in a 15% rye mash was probably a bad idea but we got through it. The 90 minute boil was longer than usual and didn’t boil off as much as I had expected so we ended up with about a quart of extra wort and about 8 gravity points shy of our target. Such is life. I guess it’s time to invest in a metal ruler to use as a measuring stick during the boil. I’m pretty sure the beer will come out fine anyway. The Sixpoint yeast went to town on the wort within a few hours. Now we just wait.

To aid in the brewing, we drank some fun beers and had a small scotch tasting. Look for a review of Lagunitas’s The Hairy Eyeball Ale in the next few days. That stuff is killer. The Long Trail Hibernator was tasty but paled in comparison. We also sampled my recently bottled brown ale. It’s not quite ready for prime time but when it is I’ll let you all know.

You may notice that I don’t have any pictures of the brew day. Here’s the thing:  brewing beer doesn’t really look different from one batch to the next. For the most part, anyway. So what’s the point of posting pictures of each batch? I don’t want to bore anybody more than I already have.

And that was how I spent my summer vacation four day weekend. Not bad, I think. Next time I’ll tell you all about the old ale that went into secondary yesterday.

Oh you want the recipe?

Monmouth Street Rye Ale

Batch size: 2.5 gallons
4.5 lbs Domestic 2-row
0.875 lbs Rye malt
0.5 lbs Crystal 40L
0.25 oz Magnum @ 60 minutes
0.25 oz Perle @ 30 minutes
0.25 oz Cascade @ 1 minute

Mash at 157F for 60 minutes

Yeast: Sixpoint IPA yeast
Ferment in the mid to upper 60′s.

I was shooting for an OG of 1.055 but ended up around 1.047. Oh well.

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