If you look hard enough, especially in the Upper Midwest, you can certainly find a few beers made with wild rice. However—and this is easy for me to say—there ought to be more of them.
The more I learn and think about wild rice—which, like corn, is a truly indigenous American grain—the more I believe it ought to be more entrenched in our continent’s craft-beer landscape. It could have its own signature style—a wild rice brown ale, perhaps, or an amber lager—that every brewery in Minnesota or the wider Great Lakes region feels like they must make or else the locals get cranky.
Yet relatively few breweries have given it a try. Maybe it’s too expensive or challenging to use in the brewhouse. Perhaps, like brown ale itself, its nutty, earthy flavors just aren’t that fashionable. Whatever the reasons, wild rice remains a niche ingredient—but let’s consider its attributes anyway, and let’s ponder whether it may have greater potential in the craft brewery.
What Is Wild Rice, Really?
A much-repeated fact is that wild rice isn’t technically a rice at all (and, when cultivated, isn’t technically wild, either). That is factual enough for taxonomic reasons: Proper Asian rice belongs to the Oryza genus, while wild rice has its own, Zizania. Does it matter? Ultimately, like rice, it’s an edible grass seed—a true grain—and one that loves to grow in water.
There are a few different species, but the one most North Americans know best is Zizania palustris, or Northern wild rice, native to the Great Lakes region. Nobody domesticated wild rice as a crop in the modern sense until the middle of the 20th century, but the Anishinaabe and other indigenous peoples were harvesting it for centuries before Europeans arrived. It remains culturally (and culinarily) important for many North American tribes. There are even two towns—Mahnomen, Minnesota, and Menomonie, Wisconsin—that get their names from the Ojibwa name for wild rice, manoomin.
While wild rice grows in many places, perhaps no state identifies with it as much as Minnesota, where it’s the official state grain. Yet most North Americans have probably encountered wild rice as food at some point—even if not at home. It’s a specialty item in many restaurants, and virtually every American supermarket carries it.
There are many ways to cook wild rice, but many of us associate it with soups, pilafs, or casseroles. It’s dark in color, gluten-free, and relatively high in protein—among grains, only oats have more. Once cooked, it tends to have a nicely chewy texture and distinctly nutty, earthy flavor.
What’s it do for beer, then?
Brewing with Wild Rice
Search online, and you’ll find that many existing wild-rice beers are clustered around the Great Lakes, in both Canada and the United States—but even so, only a small minority of breweries in the region appear to have made one.
An even smaller minority has made it a regular offering. Among them, to name a few examples: Boundary Waters Brunette, a brown ale from Voyageur in Grand Marais, Minnesota; Tippy Canoe, a pale lager from Lake of the Woods in Kenora, Ontario; and 46 North, a blonde ale from the recently shuttered Roundhouse in Nisswa, Minnesota.
Another brewery that regularly offers a beer made from wild rice is Northbound Smokehouse & Brewpub in Minneapolis. (You might remember their award-winning bocks from our Fall 2025 issue; see “Brewer’s Perspective: Eisbock It with Northbound,” beerandbrewing.com.) In fact, Northbound offers two wild-rice beers: the Wild Rice Amber Bock lager and Wild Brunette, a brown ale.
Founder and brewer Jamie Robinson says the ingredient adds an earthiness, nuttiness, and a note of vanilla to those beers. It also adds a regional connection.
“Our branding, logo, beer names, food, and decor are all northern Minnesota–themed, which makes wild rice a perfect ingredient for our brand,” Robinson says. (Northbound even puts wild rice into a veggie burger that was hearty enough for Guy Fieri to feature it on Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.)
Northbound sources wild rice from the Mille Lacs Wild Rice Corporation in Aitkin, Minnesota. Mille Lacs produces the Canoe brand of wild-rice products, and the company has steered some of its marketing efforts toward craft brewers. (In transparency, Canoe has been an advertising partner in our magazine and podcasts.) Canoe sells cultivated wild rice as well as harvested—the latter is collected from local streams rather than farmed.
Robinson says they buy the harvested type—and specifically, they want the broken bits, aka the “brewer’s grade” wild rice. “The smaller, broken pieces cook faster and have more surface area,” he says. They’re also less expensive.
The Northbound team prepares the wild rice in a cereal mash—but not in the brewhouse. “We are a small brewpub brewing on a seven-barrel system, with no cereal cooker,” Robinson says. “However, since we are a brewpub, we have a kitchen. We get in early in the morning, before the cooks arrive, and use every pot we have to cook the wild rice before we mash in. We simmer it for about 45 minutes, or until the rice is soft enough to turn into a paste when pressed between your fingers. Then, all of the wild rice and the water it was cooked in are dumped into the mash with the rest of the malt bill.”
There are a couple pitfalls to avoid when brewing with wild rice—and one is a stuck mash.
“You’ll need a fair amount of rice hulls to lighten up the mash bed from all of the rice,” Robinson says. “We use wild rice hulls because they carry extra desired aroma.”
Besides its more appealing flavors, Robinson says wild rice also can contribute a lot of tannins to the finished beer.
“To soften the harshness from the tannins,” he says, “we use RO water in the mash, to limit the sulfate and alkalinity that accentuate the harshness of the tannins. We also increase the dosage of kettle finings and Biofine, to drop out much of the tannins that cause that harshness.”
So, brewing with wild rice isn’t necessarily as simple as dumping it into the mash and hoping for good results—and that may be one reason why it’s rarer in craft breweries than we might expect.
There’s also the cost. Prices vary by supplier and scale, but roughly: For wild rice, you might expect to pay two to four times what you’d pay for base malt, pound for pound. At homebrew scale, unless you’re buying 50-pound bags, you might pay $7 to $10 a pound online or at the supermarket.
Wild Rice Lager
One Midwestern brewery that recently decided to take wild rice for a spin is suburban Chicago’s Goldfinger (recently named Favorite Lager Brewer in our 2025 Readers’ Choice poll).
Goldfinger Wild Rice Lager—available in the Downer’s Grove taproom even as I write this—is a collab with their friends at Triptych of Savoy, Illinois. Goldfinger founder-brewer Tom Beckmann says they’d been talking about it for a while, “and we were heading down the path of something classically American. … We decided on brewing a classic American amber lager, replacing [what] may normally be regular rice with wild rice, sourcing hops from Wisconsin, and using an interesting, resurrected Midwestern lager yeast from Yeast Bay.”
They got the wild rice from Minnesota’s Canoe and kicked the brew day off with a cereal mash, combining it with some base malt and cooking at 203–212°F (95–100°C) for 20 minutes. From there, the mix went into the step mash. “We had been warned that the wild rice may be a little like cement,” Beckmann says, “but with a loose enough water-to-grist ratio, we had no issues. We ended up using some rice hulls as a precaution, but a fraction of what you’d normally use.”
And how does the wild rice’s flavor manifest in the finished beer?
“Unlike regular rice and corn, it tastes exactly like wild rice,” Beckmann says. “The flavor translated through the beer, providing awesome earthy notes, nuttiness, and an interesting dark-fruit bouquet.”
For a lager brewer used to cereal mashes, decoctions, and step mashes, the wild rice presented no great challenges. “It was very easy to work with and imparts a lot of character to the finished beer,” Beckmann says. “I would highly recommend playing around with it.”
