Another Quinoa Pale Ale

Off of Dirtbag's original post about a quinoa pale ale, I was inspired. Here's what I brewed today. I'll let you know how it comes out. I used home malted grains, 1/3 pale, 1/3 lightly roasted, 1/3 medium roasted.

Any updates on this? Did you malt the quinoa?

??????

I did malt the quinoa myself. I had some problems sparging and should have added rice hulls. So I ended up with less wort than expected. Otherwise, the brew day went fine. I boiled as normal, added hops, whirlfloc, chilled to upper 60s, pitched the yeast, and it was on its way. Something weird happened though. Only about 1/3 of the wort in the primary cleared and the bottom 2/3 remained sludgy, never clearing. So I ended up with about 8 bottles from 7 lbs of grain. It's carbonating right now, so I've yet to taste it. But for the simple fact that the end product is incredibly inefficient in terms of inputs, I'd not do the recipe again, even if it tastes great. I'll posts some pics in a day or two.

@Dirtbag I wasn't at all saying I brewed your recipe, just that it gave me the idea to try making a Quinoa Pale Ale.

Where do you buy 7 lbs of quinoa that isn't insanely expensive?

Thx
T

costco sells white quinoa at $9/4lbs.

10 lbs for $35 at quinoa.com
Good deal at Costco

Yeah costco has very decent prices. It's a tad more expensive malting though because you lose about 1/4 of the original weight, that is if you start out with 10 pounds of grain, you'll end up with 7.5 lbs of malted grain. So it cost about $20-$25 for the batch. If I got 20 beers out of it, I'd say it would be totally worth it. But for the measly 8 or so I ended up with, I'll just write the money off as entertainment money in that I experimented, brewed and saw the results.

@ mloster, thanks for the reply. This sounds like an interesting experiment. I contacted Jon Plise who works for MoreBeer, and know quite a bit about gluten free brewing. He advised me to add buckwheat the the quinoa beer as well.
Let us know how it tastes when they are ready!

I didn't get a pic of it, but I just tried it last night. I'm happy and sad at the same time. I'm extremely happy because this was one of the best beers I've ever made. It smelled a little like caramel and brown sugar, had perfect head retention, and a a sharp though not overpowering bitterness. Since I used to drink regular beer, I can attest to the fact that it was pretty darn tasty. The sad part though is the limited amount of bottles that 7 lbs of quinoa made. I'm not sure how I'd properly get it to clear up i.e. separate the sludgy part from the cleared part or avoid the sludgy part all together. If you had any ideas, I'd love to hear them. The buckwheat idea is a good one. Maybe you could use pale buckwheat malt as your base, sort of like 2-row and then add malted/ roasted quinoa to get various colors and tastes.

here's a pic

very dandy indeed

mloster said:

Something weird happened though. Only about 1/3 of the wort in the primary cleared and the bottom 2/3 remained sludgy, never clearing.

Click to expand...

Do you use a secondary? I've found that's always helped me. That and Irish Moss. Though my focus is on dark GF beers so I may not have as much clarity as I think.

Nope, I didn't use a secondary. It wasn't even clarity that I had problems with. The bottom 2/3 was just sludge. While the top 1/3 was fine and I could have racked that to a secondary, I was concerned about the bottom part of immovable sludge.

I wonder if a special mash rest is needed to break down Quinoa properly. I'm thinking about how a beta glucan rest can help break down Rye mashes. I wonder if there is a certain rest that could break down the quinoa better. Seems odd that it made sludge though.

edit: I consulted "Google" and found a recipe where the brewer states the Quinoa should be cooked prior to adding to the mash. I've also seen some recipes that don't say to pre-cook the Quinoa so I'm not sure if this is the missing link or not.

jusware said:

I wonder if a special mash rest is needed to break down Quinoa properly. I'm thinking about how a beta glucan rest can help break down Rye mashes. I wonder if there is a certain rest that could break down the quinoa better. Seems odd that it made sludge though.

edit: I consulted "Google" and found a recipe where the brewer states the Quinoa should be cooked prior to adding to the mash. I've also seen some recipes that don't say to pre-cook the Quinoa so I'm not sure if this is the missing link or not.

Click to expand...

I would guess that the other recipe was not using malted quinoa. In this case, cooking the quinoa would denature the enzymes and so keep any conversion from happening.

The other trick is figuring out whether the enzymes necessary for something like a beta-glucan rest is present in the malted quinoa. I've got no idea.

If there's just a TON of sludge, there may have a ton of starch leftover. Starch needs to be gelatinized before the enzymes can break them down into fermentable sugars, and the trick about GF brewing is that most GF grains have very high gelatinization temperatures, whereas barley malt starch gelatinizes conveniently in the same temp. range that our brewing enzymes are active.

One thing to try would be a decoction with some (or all) of your grist to ensure gelatinization. Here's a good overview of the process:
http://braukaiser.com/wiki/index.php?title=Decoction_Mashing

I'd start with the "variation" on the "enhanced double decoction"

Cheers!