I don't think I posted about the first time I tried to do this beer - it predated this blog by a bit. A buddy of mine had a baby girl he named Violet, so I got a hankering to try out the black rice mentioned in Radical Brewing that mentioned a purple color. I used a pound of it in a straight pils and while it was purple-ish in the fermenter, it came across more as gold in the glass. Tasted great, but the look was wrong.
So I decided to try again. I wanted to increase the amount of black rice I was going to use, so I also increased the gravity overall to compensate for the simplicity of rice in the grainbill. I also boiled some beets in the mash liquor before adding it in, to get a little more color that way. It came out pretty significantly purple, although more lavender-like than a royal purple. OG came in at 1.066. I took some pictures when I was moving it from its overnight chilling vessel into the carboy, but they don't really do it any justice, so I'm going to wait to show anything until the finished product can be put in a glass.
Grainbill was pretty simple - 11 pounds pilsner malt, 2.5 lbs black rice. I doubt the beets contributed much - it was about 7 beets in a total of about 7 gallons. I hopped it to about 40 IBUs with some 18.5% AA Summit hops, then a .5 oz addition at 10 minutes of the same hops, and a 1 oz addition at flameout. Repitched the White Labs German Lager yeast that I've used now in my second pilsner, then a schwarzbier. This is probably the last go-round for this yeast, it darkened significantly from the schwarz and the purple from this beer probably won't do anything to help that.
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