Fantasy Homebrewing: Mexican-American Rye Lager :)

In my last post I outlined how to play fantasy homebrewing. This past weekend I brewed the beer that I drafted. It made for an interesting recipe and brew day.

My strategy on brew day was to try and draft for ingredients I thought were least likely to be picked. In my head this was ingredients for a mexican lager. Vienna base malt (who really wants Vienna for their base?) Flaked corn, Mexican Lager yeast, Saaz hops (may be difficult to get) and maybe some roasted malt for coloring. This is what I ended up with in 5 rounds of drafting:

Here are the ingredients allowed to everyone:
Water
Acids (Lactic and Phosphoric)
Salts (all)
Rice Hulls
Potassium Sorbate

My Draft List:

Rye Malt
Flaked Corn
Flaked Barley

Magnum Hops

Mexican Lager Yeast

Base malts were going first and I was worried about not being left with anything worth using. Vienna had already been selected and the only things left were rye, mild and then some extracts. I quickly chose Rye. After that I had to plan my other ingredients as best I could. I now regret selecting Flaked barley instead of some sort of chocolate or roasted malt to adjust coloring. By selecting a lager yeast I'll hopefully be able to temper the large portion of rye in the grist, only time will tell.

Okay, gotta make something out of this, there's $100 on the line.

5lbs Rye Malt (I considered using less but I needed the diastatic power)
3lbs Flaked Corn (This may be a little much considering how the wort tasted)
1lb Flaked Barley (Just for the GU, I only purchased 5lbs Rye)
1lb Rice Hulls

.25oz Magnum @ 60
1oz Magnum @ 5

Mexican Lager Yeast WLP940

So I brewed this beer and not one stuck sparge, no issues at all really. It's very light in color with a lot of what I assume is beta-glucans in the wort. A viscous and cloudy looking element.  The wort smells of rye malt so hopefully lagering will temper that a bit.

Beersmith held up it's end of the bargain and I nailed my mash temp of 150.

OG was 1.041 of an estimated 1.043 so not too bad.

I'll be sure to report back how this beer placed in the Fantasy Homebrewing. Until then I highly recommend implementing this game in your own homebrew club, it's tons of fun.

Fantasy Homebrewing - Every Homebrew Club Should Play

Ever try to come up with new activities or games for your homebrew club? This is one that's having some success with our club right now.

Do you like fantasy football/baseball/hockey etc...? Doesn't matter because if you love to homebrew you're probably going to love this game.

The concepts are exactly the same as fantasy sports but instead of drafting players you're drafting homebrew ingredients. I borrowed this idea from the Fermentation Nation Podcast (http://fermentationnation.net/tag/fantasy-draft/) and my homebrew club loved it. Even people who professed hating fantasy sports wanted in after the draft. After watching how much fun the rest of us had how could they not?

Quick and Dirty How to Play

Find out how many people are going to play then collect $10 (or whatever) from each player. This will be split 70/30 between first and second place.

Select that exact number Yeast, Hops and Base Malts / Extracts. This somewhat mimics the fantasy sports drafting in that only a few are going to be able to draft elite "players". The rest are left to pick from the things like Rye and Mild base malts or Fuggles hops :) Who knows, you may invent a new style playing this game. (We may change this to auction style next time around placing a high value on Pilsner, 2-Row, Marris Otter, Golden Promise etc...)

Throw a tag for each number of the total number of players into a hat. Have each player blindly draw a number from the hat. This will be your draft order. The draft progress from 1-Max # Players then back down Max # - 1 so the last player picks twice and later the first player picks twice etc... This progresses for 5 rounds ( you may want to adjust that).

Players can choose from any category they like in any order they like. They may only pick 1 Hop, 1 Yeast and 1 base malt. Some ingredients like water, finings, rice hulls and salts we made available to everyone.

Have everyone brew there beers giving them 2 months to have them ready (you know for the people who drafted lager yeast) and then have the entire club vote on the beers in a "Peoples Choice" sort of way since the styles will vary widely.

We were having monthly style competitions but it became taxing so this is one of our alternatives. If you have an activity your homebrew club does that you love please share it in the comments.

S.L.A.M. Fantasy Homebrewing Official Rules

Here are the officials rules we came up with for our club:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jFAcgc25To4i0e-mr8L_7_xbhSR-swlPq1o_s16sMVc/edit?usp=sharing

And here was the first draft list we used:


https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VDLaAjlVbENj7Yb84d69aBigSkATuO_X3f1itHabPFw/edit?usp=sharing


We spent about an hour drafting for 13 players. This was after the club had been meeting for an hour and a half so everyone was good and greased up, I recommend doing that.

This is the scoring sheet we use for all club competitions. People keep track of their favorite with hash marks etc... then circle their winner at the end. We collect the sheets to find the winner then we compile the feedback anonymously and provide that to the brewers. This helps people improve their beers and allows members to be completely honest when tasting a beer.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gtoN-s4guozYS0_ap7qm6Mi64AdJ-YWbRO6843zsN6M/edit?usp=sharing