Gluten free beer

[LCBREW]

Hey BNers,
My buddy is gluten intolerant (henceforth known as glutarded). He's been doing some pretty awesome ciders with local jonagolds from last season but wants to brew beer. He asked if he could do an all oat ale or all rice all. I didn't know what to tell him. I don't know if anything will convert without barley. I know he can get sorghum syrup but he wanted to to an all grain...you be a real brewer.
Please help
Cheers!
LC

[Thirsty Boy]

Absolutely.

If he can tolerate oats (some gluten free people cant) he's on a winner.

A: you can buy malted sorghum.
B: you can buy malted oats
C: you can malt your own gluten free grains, Millet works well and makes for nice beer
D: you can muck about with malt free brewing using other sources of enzymes

If I was going to brew for your buddy, I would go with:

30% Malted Oats
30% Malted Sorghum
20% Unmalted Millet
20% Rice
Some candi syrup or caramel for those sorts of flavours.

There are a few techniques involved in GF brewing... most of the GF grains, even the malted ones have starch gelatinisation temperatures above the denaturing temperatures of the enzymes.

For the mash you need to do a sort of a decoction - you need to mash in low, stir well and rest for a while at about 60°C. Then drain as much liquid as possible off into a seperate pot - the liquid is where your enzymes are. Get as much of it as you can. Now take the solid part and decoct it. Add some water if you need to. Bring it up through a couple of rest steps, then boil it for a while.

Let it cool down some and then mix the solid and liquid back together. There are decoction calculators in Pro-mash, Beersmith etc that will allow you to work out what temps to let things cool down to etc so you can hit you temps.

Aim for a temp in the low 60's (C) and let it mash for a good long time, you have to convert all that unmalted adjunct remember, then step up to a high 60's rest (say 68-69°C) then mash out.

Adding a big pile of rice hulls will allow you to lauter - lots of those grains have no husk. Oh - you might as well crush the grains really quite finely, this will help with gelatinisation and conversion and wont matter because they are mostly huskless anyway. You might want to do the oats seperately and mill them more normally.

Then its boil and ferment as per normal - use Safale, saflager yeasts. They are Gluten Free.

Hope that helps. Any Q's. Feel free to ask.

TB

PS - You can also make cookies (just flour water and a little sugar) out of GF flours - sorghum, millet, rice etc, he'll know which ones. And bake them to various levels of darkness to emulate kilned malts like amber, brown, choc etc. Burn em fairly black for roasty flavours. If you make a pile of smallish cookie, you can just add them to your mash like they were steeping grains. The cooking pre-gelatinises them too. Crush em up in your mill/fingers and they dissolve right in.

Using an adaption of BIAB can/will help you in this endevour. You'll work it out.

[LCBREW]

Thanks Thirsty Boy,
We've begun to work on what "style" of beer he wants to emulate (as close as he can) probably an amber or stout. Might try to malt/mash and toast to get some crystal type oat or sorhgum malts. we'll see
thanks for your help
LCB

[Thirsty Boy]

You can toast easily enough to get the darker grains from your sorghum and your oats. But making crystal is a bit of PITA and to be honest, you can get the same sort of flavours from using sugars. Caramels, candi sugars, demerra sugar, raw sugar, golden syrup, maple sugar, palm sugar, treacle, molasses, honey... so many different types and they should see you right for your toffee, caramel type flavours. Save you a bit of trouble.

If you're searching for substitutes for grains you (as a gluten tolerant brewer) know about - then I suggest a quick way to match flavour profiles with something you think might be a good GF replacement ingredient, is to make a tea. Steep the grain you would normally use in a cup of hot water - cool it down. Now steep the candidates for becoming a replacement... then try to match the flavours between the original and the new... don't be afraid to blend the new stuff a little. You are your friend's guide taste-buds in this, he cant taste the original... but you can.

This will take a bit of effort... beer is made from barley malt and to try and get something that tastes the same, but not use barley - its pretty damn hard. I strongly suggest a series of small batches. Just 1G in a growler or something like that.

As an AG brewer, you're going to have to suspend any snobbishness you might feel about adjuncts, if you want to pull off the GF beer thing, you need all the resources at your disposal and most of the adjuncts are gluten free.

Oh - and have a read of these documents

http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B75 ... MTYy&hl=en

http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B75 ... ZTU4&hl=en

They were written by Andrew Lavery when he was a homebrewer - now he owns and runs O'brien Brewing a Gluten Free micro brewery here in Australia.

Cheers

Thirsty

[alan_marks]

Also, check out Charlie Pappazian's article in last months issue of Zymurgy. He writes about a relatively new enzyme additive which breaks down the proteins which cause issues with people who require gluten free diets. If I recall correctly, this enzyme breaks down proteins to a level that many people can tolerate in beers using malted barley.

Hope this helps,
Alan

[ApresSkiBrewer]

TB, Never thought about the residual wort not being barley based within the smack packs or vials. Interesting. Granted its a very little bit of wort, but I guess it wouldn't be considered GF if you used it.

[Thirsty Boy]

Not only the residual wort, but the yeast itself is grown in a gluten bearing substrate. Depends how sensitive you are, but full on coeliacs can go all wonky on even the tiniest bit.

The Saf range (and I think the Danstar stuff) of dried yeast is grown on a molasses substrate, and Wyeast has a couple of strains that they prepare especially to be gluten free. I dont know if whitelabs has any though.

If you are helping your friend to brew, be careful about things like crushing the grain in your mill, using buckets you have used to brew with etc etc. They'll all need to be very carefully cleaned to make sure there isn't any cross contamination.

Any of the stuff I know about GF brewing etc I have learned from Andrew (previous post) and so I suggest that if anyone os seriously interested in trying GF brewing, it would be well worth dropping him an e-mail.

Thirsty

[spiderwrangler]

Brewed one for my wife recently... semi based on Sam Adams Summer (Wit).

6lbs Sorghum extract
0.5lb Belgian Candi
6oz maltodextrin
1 1/3 oz Hersbrucker @ 45
2g Grains of Paradise & 0.2 oz Coriander @ 15
1.75 oz citrus zest @ 5
2g Grains of Paradise & 0.2 oz coriander @ 1
0.66 oz Hersbrucker @ 1

OG 1053
FG 1017

It's been in the bottle two weeks, haven't tried it recently, it was only slightly carbed after 1 week, but I've got good hopes for it.