Rye Brewing Experience

Mashing
1

I’ve got about 10-15 all grain batches under my belt but I had never used rye before. I did a Rye PA with home grown cascades and an ounce of Chinook for bittering. Smells awesome.

I measure out my water, hit my 152 mash temp and after batch sparging I’m way short on my boil volume. I was going for 7 gallons and ended up with around 5. I ended up doing another sparge with a couple extra gallons and after the boil my gravity was a little high, but nothing too unreasonable.

Does rye typically absorb more water than barley? I don’t think I measured my water wrong and it turned out fine, but it may be something I will have to plan for in the future!

2

Rye does not absorb more water than barley, certainly not an extra two gallons. Sounds like a math error.

3

Well, I’m certainly not going to rule out user error…

4

Maybe your calculations for absorption are incorrect? Some one correct me if Im wrong but isnt it .13 gallons of water per pound of grain?

5

Well I have just recently starting to keep track of this, and been having absorbtion rates that vary from .08 to .17 per pound depending on which grains are used… But I havent used rye since then

6

I’ve always used .1 per pound as a generalization, but I’m no expert!