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.
Topic: Rice (Read 4375 times)
