Homebrew Summer brings back Ryeders of Rohan rye IPA recipe

BattleMage Brewing brought back Ryeders of Rohan on Friday, May 29, giving one of Homebrew Summer’s sharper pro-am success stories a second run at the taproom. The rye IPA started as a homebrew idea in the 2024 edition of San Diego Beer News’ annual program, then moved from garage-scale curiosity to a beer that customers wanted back.

That arc is the whole point of Homebrew Summer. The program began in 2021 and pairs local breweries with homebrewers, then shares the finished recipes so readers can brew the beers at home in all-grain or extract form. In 2024, the call drew 19 participating businesses and nearly 50 submitted recipes. Since the program began, San Diego Beer News said 35 breweries had worked with homebrewers to produce 50 pro-am beers, while 24 brewing companies had shared scaled-down commercial recipes. Ryeders of Rohan now sits squarely in that lane between hobby brewing and professional validation.

The original concept came from Andy Konopak, who told San Diego Beer News he started homebrewing about six years before the 2024 feature after pestering Ryan Sather about how beer was made at BattleMage. Sather and co-founder Chris Barry mentored him and even handed over old homebrewing equipment. Doing so also gave Konopak a final brew at the Vista brewery before he moved to Colorado to pursue opera singing, a path that took him from local brewing circles to stages with San Diego Opera and Los Angeles Opera, plus performances in Germany and Austria.

For BattleMage, Ryeders of Rohan was the brewery’s only rye collaboration, and Sather said the recipe let the team lean into rye’s spicy, earthy edge without burying it under hops. The beer was built with Simcoe, Krush, Quantum and Nectaron, a combination that gives the style enough lift to keep the rye character in the glass instead of letting it turn muddy or sweet. That matters in rye IPA, where too much malt weight can flatten the whole thing.

BattleMage Brewing, at 2870 Scott Street, Suite 102, in Vista, has always leaned into a fantasy-heavy identity, and Ryeders of Rohan fit that personality without feeling like a gimmick. Its return shows how a homebrew recipe can move beyond a one-off collaboration and earn a real place in a brewery’s lineup when the idea is solid, the execution is clean and the local drinkers keep asking for another pour.