You know what you almost never see on tap? German rye beer, also known as Roggenbier. It’s a real shame because beers made with rye have some of the most interesting and enjoyable spicy flavors out there, and they make for great, light-ish winter drinking options for those who just can’t wait for the Hefeweizen to come back around again in warmer weather. If you’re lucky, you can find something like Hoss from Great Divide (Denver, Colorado)—and if you’re not (okay, maybe even if you are), you should simply make your own.
Style
Roggenbier is, in many ways, a simple beer: it’s principally a variation on the Weizen theme but instead of wheat uses rye, which adds more spice and less bread to the flavor profile. There’s some overlap in terms of the grist and the yield on esters and phenols (at least if you use a Weizen yeast—but as you’ll see below, it isn’t a requirement), but this beer deserves an identity of its own. The conventional style wisdom is that it should be a relatively simple and low-key beer—a Dunkelweizen with rye instead of wheat with a bit more heft, relying mostly on the yeast to provide interest, and using the rye simply as an accent flavor.
This is one of the times, though, when I’m going to go ahead and differ with the style mavens and recommend that you go rogue with it. This is a historic beer style that’s open to a great deal of interpretation, and my goal with it is to create the best showcase possible for the rye rather than play it safe. The recipe below can be split and tweaked on the cold side to create an interesting lager-yeasted “drinking” batch and a strait-laced Dunkelweizen-esque “competition” batch—you can modify it to suit how you’d like to use it. But for the record: it was the interesting version that yielded me my second-highest-ever score in competition (45/50) rather than the traditional version. So...