Rhubarb Menace

There is a concotion that has been growing in popularity in some homebrew circles, and I’ve even seen something like it being produced by some commercial breweries. It’s called Graff, and it’s a hybrid of beer and cider, though arguably more cider than beer, though I suppose that depends on how you decided to build a recipe. I don’t have access to a lot of apples, however I do have access to a lot of rhubarb. now rhubarb and apples aren’t particularly similar, except they both have malic acid as their predominant acid. I figured this was good enough reason to try making a graff with rhubarb instead of apples.

Thus was born Rhubarb Menace.

Some of the other differences in rhubarb and apples is the amount of sugar. Apple juice will have around 5% sugar, rhubarb has pretty much no sugar to speak of. Rhubarb also has a much stronger concentration of acid compared to apples so I don’t need as much rhubarb to achieve a similar amount of acid/flavor compared to apples. To make up for these differences I added table sugar (sucrose) and water to my recipe to sort of simulate apple juice but made from rhubarb.

As for the grain bill, ‘traditional’ graff has got some wheat to aid in head retention, a bit of crystal malt, and a bunch of light dry malt extract or just pale malt. I kind of wanted to have a red color in my graff so I decided to go with some Carared crystal malt, I also wanted some caramelly flavors so I added a crystal 120, and also a pound of two-row and a pound of wheat.

My recipe ended up as the following:

* 10 Lbs Rhubarb * 3 Lbs Carared * 2 Lbs table sugar * 1 Lb Crystal 120 * 1 Lb malted two-row barley * 1 Lb malted wheat * 8 oz Ginger Syrup (@10 minutes) * 1 oz Cascade Hops (@15 minutes) * 1 Tbsp Calcium Carbonate * 1 Tbsp Pectic Enzyme * 1 tsp Yeast Nutrient * Wyeast Belgian Ardennes yeast

I put the rhubarb in the fermentor with the sugar, calcium carbonate, and pectinase to thaw in the morning.

In the evening I did a fairly large minimash with all the grain in ~2 gallons of water. That went pretty well but it was a bit large for the small pot I was using. Regardless I seemed to get pretty good efficiency.

After the boil I strained out the hops and poured the hot wort over the top of the still partially frozen rhubarb, this worked pretty well to cool the wort down. Then I filled the fermentor with additional water to about the 5.25 gallon line. The temperature was around 72F so I pitched the yeast and sealed the fermentor. OG 1.048

Fermentation took off and it went pretty well. I pressed the rhubarb after a week and left the beer in the primary, it had fermented fairly quickly and a lot further down than I (or hopville) had anticipated; it was at around 1.008 at pressing. It looks like the Ardennes yeast ate pretty much all of the sugar except for the stuff from the Crystal 120. I’d adjust the recipe for future batches to include additional crystal malt (I know carared is crystal but apparently it’s not crystal enough).

Tasting it at pressing I was unimpressed, it didn’t taste bad or anything but it also didn’t taste good, it was a really sort of meh. I knew from some of the talk about graff that age is very important to the beer’s flavor so I held out some small hope.

I left it in primary for another week, then I transferred it to a keg. FG was 1.006 for an ABV of 5.6% it was tasting slightly better after the week but I was still unimpressed.

After 2 weeks in the keg the flavor had improved drastically, the flavors really came out and can be picked out when you taste it as opposed to before when it was just a muddy mess. It is a sour beer (how could it not be?) with a slight fruitiness and some malt in the background, it tastes a lot like a sour red ale, if you like sour beers you will probably like this. I’m quite pleased with how this has come out especially after being fairly concerned with the initial tastes at pressing/transfer.

As I mentioned above, I would adjust the recipe to include a bit more dark crystal malt to leave some additional residual sweetness and boost the malt flavor a bit more, and maybe use a munich malt instead of two-row. I can’t taste the ginger at all so I’d just leave that out and probably increase the hops. Obviously this could use a bit of refining but I’d call this first try a success.