Help Me, I'm Gluten Free...

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BernsBrews

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I have celiac disease and my boyfriend is fantastic enough to brew strictly gluten free for me.Two weeks ago we attempted our first ever home brew(gluten free or not). The process went well, we had a lot of fun but we are not so sure if we did everything right. Here is our first recipe (sorry if my terminology is not up to par...we're new):

5# White sorghum syrup
3# Malted, toasted, cracked quinoa
4oz Cascade hops
1oz Glacier hops
Nottingham ale yeast
Irish moss
corn sugar

We heated 2 gallons of water to about 160F and steeped our quinoa for about 20 min. Then we brought it to a boil and added the sorghum extract. We added 2.5 oz cascade and 1 oz glacier and boiled for 60 min. at 45min we added a tbsp Irish moss and at 55min we added 1.5 oz of cascade for finishing.

Then we cooled it quickly and moved it to the carboy to ferment, we took an OG reading of 1.040, we have no idea if this is good or bad. It seemed to us like the chances of our beer having a decent alcohol percentage is low.

Is is possible we did not have enough fermentable sugars? We were thinking about possibly adding some honey at flame-out for the sugars?


We were eager to start and failed to read as much as we should of on home brewing. Our wort smelled phenomenal but it's looking skeptical to me now. We are just looking for any advise on brewing and what we can do better. Please help us out. I just want a delicious IPA and Stout at least once in my life.

Any information is helpful please!!
 
gotta start somewhere, give it another week or two in the carboy. when your bottling it brew up another batch of something and reuse the yeast. start a pipeline of beer and never look back! 3 weeks later you will be bottling another brew, making a brew and drinking a brew :)
 
I'm still thinking it'll result in 3.5-4% I think I've been aiming for 5% Does that seem right to anyone else?
Did you happen to take a picture of the toasted quinoa, or the resulting wort? I've been curious about the effects of different steeped grains since I still don't understand their effects on color/flavor. Speaking of which, did you happen to use a purchased sprouted quinoa, or did you malt it yourselves?
 
I'm also interesting in your experience with the Quinoa. I'd like to experiment with malting a steeping such G-free grains.
 
We malted the quinoa ourselves. It was a very easy process. We just placed it in our bottling bucket and filled it to the top with water and let it soak for 1-2 days. We changed out the water once and made sure it was warm. After about 30 hrs our grains had sprouted to about 2xs the length of the seed. Then we spread them all out on towels to dry over night. After they were dry we baked them in the oven around 250F stirring every 10 min until they were a mix of dark and light browns, they smelly nutty and delicious. Then we cracked them in a food processor. I'll take a picture of out fermenting wort and post it later. It does not look good haha. It's super cloudy. we didn't get a picture of the quinoa, but we will experiment again in a few weeks and I'll post some. It was a mix of tans and browns though.
 
I have celiac disease and my boyfriend is fantastic enough to brew strictly gluten free for me.Two weeks ago we attempted our first ever home brew(gluten free or not). The process went well, we had a lot of fun but we are not so sure if we did everything right. Here is our first recipe (sorry if my terminology is not up to par...we're new):

5# White sorghum syrup
3# Malted, toasted, cracked quinoa
4oz Cascade hops
1oz Glacier hops
Nottingham ale yeast
Irish moss
corn sugar

We heated 2 gallons of water to about 160F and steeped our quinoa for about 20 min. Then we brought it to a boil and added the sorghum extract. We added 2.5 oz cascade and 1 oz glacier and boiled for 60 min. at 45min we added a tbsp Irish moss and at 55min we added 1.5 oz of cascade for finishing.

Then we cooled it quickly and moved it to the carboy to ferment, we took an OG reading of 1.040, we have no idea if this is good or bad. It seemed to us like the chances of our beer having a decent alcohol percentage is low.

Is is possible we did not have enough fermentable sugars? We were thinking about possibly adding some honey at flame-out for the sugars?


We were eager to start and failed to read as much as we should of on home brewing. Our wort smelled phenomenal but it's looking skeptical to me now. We are just looking for any advise on brewing and what we can do better. Please help us out. I just want a delicious IPA and Stout at least once in my life.

Any information is helpful please!!

I am assuming you missed a step in here where you topped off with water to 5gal?

If so, your OG is right in line and you actually got a fair amount of sugar from your grain. Keep in mind this sugar will probably not be very fermentable since your "mash" was only 20min long, at 160F, and didn't include any/many enzymes.

In short, your OG is as expected for your recipe, but your FG will probably be higher than you would normally expect. I predict a 3.5% full bodied beer, something like an English Mild...at least from the numbers. The citrus of the cascade may make it more like a light American Brown though.

Either way, you will have beer, and there is nothing wrong with making something light and drinkable.
 
Oh, and next time, feel free to come to us with what you want this beer to be and taste like and we can help you make a recipe that is closer to what you expect.
 
Yes, we did top off to 5 gallons, sorry I forgot to add that step. I'm glad to hear that our OG isn't too off then. Thanks. I guess we were going for a pale ale type beer, but we weren't sure where to start. When we do our next batch we will post ahead of time for some advice. What kind of enzymes to you recommend adding to the "mash", and when? Also our beer is very very cloudy at this point. Anything you recommend to make it clearer?
 
Yes, we did top off to 5 gallons, sorry I forgot to add that step. I'm glad to hear that our OG isn't too off then. Thanks. I guess we were going for a pale ale type beer, but we weren't sure where to start. When we do our next batch we will post ahead of time for some advice. What kind of enzymes to you recommend adding to the "mash", and when? Also our beer is very very cloudy at this point. Anything you recommend to make it clearer?

It's supposed to be cloudy at this point, patience will allow it to clear a lot. Then, in a few weeks if it is still cloudy, let us know.

Well, there is a few ways to go with the mash, we are still working on most of them. This is quite advanced and something you should wait to try. In the meantime, I would recommend not cracking the grain. This is more in line with "steeping".
 
I don't think there's anything wrong with a 1040 OG. I've brewed a couple GF's to those specs.

The good news is that you will have beer soon and I'm sure you will be surprised. But keep on brewing and getting your process down.

Myself- I still crack my roasted grains, it might add some startch but fo now, it's working for me :)

Any how- welcome to the forum. PS- how was your malting process, is that your first batch of malted grains?
 
We bottled up the first batch yesterday. It went very smoothly. The beer is still pretty cloudy with a light tan color. It smells delicious and we sampled it and it tasted very good, so hopefully after carbonation is done it'll turn out well. I think next week we will start with a stout. Possibly an oatmeal or chocolate, or both!
 
I strongly recomend you (or your boyfriend) to search the ingredients in a place free of gluten products, even the powder of barley, rye or wheat can trigger the celiac process. Be carefull.
 
Yes, we did top off to 5 gallons, sorry I forgot to add that step. I'm glad to hear that our OG isn't too off then. Thanks. I guess we were going for a pale ale type beer, but we weren't sure where to start.?

Did you stir the wort when you added water? I forgot to do this on my first batch and it threw my numbers off quite a bit when I took a gravity reading (it read 1.050 when it should have been 1.060).

Either way, I'm sure your beer will turn out great even if its lighter than anticipated!
 
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