My first experiment with roasting gluten free grains...

My interest in roasting grains comes mostly from wanting to try to make something like the recipe by Lcasanova here: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f78/gluten-free-pumpkin-spice-ale-147707/

If anyone is interested in reading my post in that thread, they'll see that I'm not going to exactly duplicate the recipe. I'm using it as a starting point and trying to make something close. I'm probably going to go with hallertau hops because I've liked the results every time I've used them, but I'm going to use different grains out of necessity. I can't find sorghum locally as I thought I'd be able to, so I've roasted some quinoa and some gluten free oats.

Here's what I've done:

Quinoa: 1.5 pounds, rinsed thoroughly, started at 200*F for 15 minutes, every 15 minutes I stirred and increased by 25 degrees all the way up through 375 for 15 minutes, then removed from the oven to let cool and put in a brown paper bag. Has what appears to be a mottled color because of the structure of the quinoa. Each grain has a burnt part and part that stayed almost the same color as it started.

GF Oats: two batches, each .5 pound (8 oz) rinsed lightly, started at 300 for 30 minutes, stirred then increased to 350 for 15 minutes, stirred then increased to 400 for 15 minutes. The first 8 ounces I removed here, and the second 8 ounces I stirred and left in for another 15 minutes at 400. The lighter one turned out a nice golden sort of color and the darker one turned out much darker and is almost as brown as chocolate.

I'm thinking I'll probably try the quinoa in the pumpkin spice ale recipe and mess around with the oats in four separate one gallon batches, maybe trying to burn some of my own candi syrup for two of them and using some tettnang or hersbrucker hops.

Any thoughts or suggestions? I gather from my reading that roasting gluten free grains is still in the experimental stage, even among hardcore gluten free brewers, and I'm certainly an admitted noob. I'm interested in hearing what anyone has to say...

As a new homebrewer myself, I am curious how the roast went. Did anything burn? Would you roast any differently next time?

Everything went pretty well with the grains. The quinoa was used in the pumpkin spice ale as was planned. Still haven't gotten around to using the oats yet, but hopefully I'll be able to do that within the next couple of weeks.

My first try at candi syrup didn't work out so well, though. Out of 3 batches, I got one that came out somewhere close to what I was hoping for. A light golden color, and a texture slightly less thick than honey. I have one batch that's deep amber and was nearly solid after cooling, so I added water back into that. The third batch is black and was hard as rock after cooling. That batch made an awful eye-burning haze in the apartment, and I'm shocked that it never set off the smoke detectors..

The oats have a decent aroma and I'm pretty excited to try them soon. The quinoa made a little darker color than I was hoping for after steeping at ~150*F for 30 minutes, but created a wonderful aroma so I'm pretty optimistic about the end results.

If I do anything differently, I probably wouldn't bother with starting off low and slowly stepping up the heat. I'll probably start at 400*F and just watch closely until I see something a teeny bit lighter than the color I want and remove the grains from the oven.