baldies buckshot brew!

So my FIL is GF, as well as my wife. So seeing my FIL and wife not be able to enjoy a cold frosty one has made me sad. So I decided to try my hand at a sorghum beer and although they think its good I have made it a quest to make a better gf beer. This is my latest trial.

3 lbs buckwheat (malted at 275* for close to 3 hrs)
.25 lbs flaked corn
.25 lbs gf rolled oats
3 lbs sorghum syrup
.5 lbs rice syrup solids
.5 Oz cluster hops (60 min)
.5 Oz cluster hops (30 min)
White labs American Ale yeast WLP060

Put 7.5 gallons water and bring to 150-155 and add buckwheat, corn, oats. Steep 60 minutes.
(I swear that the buckwheat and corn soaks 2 gallons water lol)
Then add sorghum and rice syrup solids and bring to boil.
Add hops at 60 and 30 minutes.
Cool and bring to fermenter and add yeast. This beer gave me a barely 5 gallon yield. My OG was a little low at 1.030. Oh well it really looks like my cream ale I brew a lot of. I will keep you posted as to results!

Sounds exciting! Might do something along those lines, but double the amount of sorghum or include an equal amount of BRS.

So seeing my FIL and wife not be able to enjoy a cold frosty one has made me sad.

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This is what got me into brewing in the first place. Worthy cause to share the love.

I was thinking of going to 5 lbs buckwheat, 1 lbs rice, and adding honey. Also I prefer beer quite hoppy so I may double the hops and keep the same times.

I don't know anyone GF, but I'm curious as to what flavours can be came up with and will try these GF alternatives one day.

Curious as to why you call this a "sorghum beer" when there's equal amounts buckwheat and sorghum and numerous other adjuncts. I think buckwheat beer sounds more catchy.

Oh yeah I guess I wrote that funny. I brewed a few beers with sorghum and rice only as it was available without doing the malting (I needed to research this more). I thought it was bitter and dry and not very good mouthful or body. So I started looking into alternative grains. I tried a buckwheat beer and it was better but not right still. this one is a lot more complex. It is the best looking going into the fermentor. So yeah I guess that statement was more a back story I didn't explain. lol. I really think sorghum gets bitter unless it ages like 3-6 months and then its like a wine. Buckwheat is better but strikes a flat more with me. I found the gf oats and thought they would be good for mouthful and head retention, along with the maize. I am really excited to see how it will be.

any reports on this yet?
i'm thinking about playing around with similar ingredients and would love to hear about your results.

I personally think it would be interesting to do a GF braggot with half buckwheat syrup and half buckwheat honey. I wonder if someone on HBT has tried this...

Pith said:

I personally think it would be interesting to do a GF braggot with half buckwheat syrup and half buckwheat honey. I wonder if someone on HBT has tried this...

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I've got the malted buckwheat and buckwheat honey. I just need to start it.

BBBF said:

I've got the malted buckwheat and buckwheat honey. I just need to start it.

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YES. Please do it. And make a thread.

Going to bottle this thursday. I chose not to rack it and couldn't as I went to florida for a few weeks. Hehe. Pics and my thoughts are coming. Flying home today.

Just stumbled across this:

http://ryanbrews.blogspot.com.au/2009/03/buckwheat-braggot_08.html

So this was a good tasting beer. To me it tasted very very good, almost like a regular beer. It was low alcohol content with 3.2%. So I plan on more buckwheat 5-6 pounds and adding in a pound of honey to bring it up. I think that will help bringing up my sugar content. Otherwise I am not going to change a thing. I will post a pic soon. It turned out like a hazy cream Ale! Mmmmmmm

If you want to bring up the ABV, I'd recommend adding 50/50 rice syrup and honey, or D-45 candi syrup instead of honey. I've done several brews with a pound of honey per 2.5 to 3 gallons, and the honey always comes out waaay too powerfully for my liking. I've had to call some of my beers "braggots" because they taste somewhere between beer and mead. It's pleasant enough, but it's not "beer".

If you want to get better conversion on the grains, and don't mind some extra work, malt the buckwheat but don't roast it (or only roast half of it, and at a lower temperature for longer), grind it very finely, and do a sort of decoction mash where you rest at saccharification temp (150-155°F) for an hour, then strain out the grain, cook it into mush in a separate container, cool it enough so that you can add it back into the first mash liquid and keep it at saccharification temp, and continue the mash for another hour or two, and then mash out. Basically you're extracting the amylase enzymes in the first mash, and then gelatinizing the grains in the decoction so that their starches can be converted, and then when you add the gelatinized grains back into the mash, the enzymes can go to work on them.

Personally I'm not sure if it's worth the work, but it's the only real way I've heard of to get the gluten-free grains to convert at all without adding extra enzymes. Unlike barley, most gluten-free grains are not only poor in diastatic power, their gelatinization temperatures are typically higher than the temperature at which their diastatic enzymes get destroyed by the heat. The decoction method gets around this, but efficiencies are typically pretty low, even with added enzymes.

Alternatively, you could try sweet potatoes and/or bananas...I've read that they're both pretty diastatically potent and am gonna brew with them this weekend to see if I can get them to convert some flaked corn and wild rice.

Thanks for the ideas. I need to look into the sweet potatoes, that sound interesting. As it stands I'm going to try using 5 lbs of buckwheat, 1 pound rice, and one pound honey. Also I'm going to double my hops as well. But if I can look into the sweet potatoes I may try to make this work too but I will surely need to research this more.