Miami Rice is our second iteration of our Japanese Rice Lager recipe. Our first attempt was the award-winning Mr Rice Guy, which we were very happy with, but decided to make a couple of minor tweaks to really try and nail it - read on to see how the brew day went.
Water
Our brew day usually starts the day/night before when we collect our water and make adjustments to the water chemistry to get our desired water profile, and this time was no different.
We fill our BrewZilla and Digiboil vessels with the required amount of water using a simple undersink water filter.
Grain
We milled the grain using our Keg King 3 roller mill which we've setup and adjusted once and hasn't missed a beat since in over 12 months of use.
Since we're using a BrewZilla (all-in-one) brewing system, we opt for a fairly coarse crush to ensure that the water can flow through the grain bed relatively easily during the mash recirculation and sparging.
And of course we can't forget about the 1kg of rice flakes. These are different to the super market brand rice flakes (Poha) that we used in the Mr Rice Guy recipe. Will be interesting to see if there's any perciptable difference between them in the finished beer.
Mashing & pH Adjustments
After mashing in leave the grain bed to settle for 10 minutes before beginning the recirculation and taking our first pH reading.
And straight away it looks like we are where we need to be at 5.23
However, we've been around long enough to know we need to take more than a single pH measurement, so we took another one a few minutes later and had a much higher reading at 5.55.
We added some lactic acid to the mash to help drive the pH back down, and in the meantime turned our attention to adjusting the pH of the sparge water.
We initially overshot the acid addition to the sparge water and ended up with a pH in the 4's, so we topped up with some filtered tap water to raise the pH again, and after adding a few litres back in, we got the pH to 5.2
Turning our attention back to the mash and our next reading showed a slight reduction at 5.41 but still a little higher than we like, so we added another couple of mL of phosphoric acid.
The recirculation started to slow down because of the rice flakes so we added some rice hulls to try and aid with recirculation performance.
One more pH measurement and we're right where we want to be at 5.26.
Our recipe calls for a step mash with an initial rest for 30 minutes at 63°C
After the initial rest at 63°C we raise the temperature to 70°C for an additional 30 minute rest. This type of mash schedule creates a wort with maximum fermentability to help ensure a low finishing gravity and a nice, dry finish on the beer.
Pre Boil Gravity Reading
After an uneventful mash and sparge, we took our pre-boil gravity reading which showed 1.041
Boil Additions
Whilst waiting for the wort to come to the boil we began measuring out our hop additions
As well as our yeast nutrient and whirlfloc
Starting/Original Gravity Reading
No boil pics, but at the end of the boil we took another gravity reading which gave us 1.045
We never take these figures as exact readings but instead use them as a guide to ensure that we're within a few points of where we expect to be.
A floating hydrometer reading showed we actually had a gravity of 1.048 - a couple points more than expected from the recipe.
Due to the hot weather, we could only chill the wort down to around 30°C with our immersion chiller so we transferred into our fermenter and left in the fermentation fridge overnight to chill to yeast pitching temperature.
Yeast & Fermentation
For this batch we're using Cellar Science's German strain, which as we understand is derived from the well known W-34/70 strain (one of our favourites). We pitched 2 packets and left it at around 13°C to ferment.
Fermentation was underway in a little over 12 hours and completed in just under a week. We then raised the temperature to 19°C for a few days for a diacetyl rest before cold crashing the beer.
Finishing gravity is 1.010 giving us exactly 5% ABV in the beer.
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