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crowe355

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Hello all, I am brand new when it comes to home brewing. I purchased and used a brew kit from Brooklyn Brew Shop, I was happy with the results from my first go round but I want to make my own beer not from a kit. I have no idea where to start, I do know however that I want/need my beer to be gluten free, and the hoppier the better. If someone could point me in the right direction it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
 
Ray Daniels' Designing Great Beers along with John Palmer's How to Brew should be a good start. Plus all the great knowledge on this site. You are on the right path, go forth and brew!
 
thatjonguy said:
Ray Daniels' Designing Great Beers along with John Palmer's How to Brew should be a good start. Plus all the great knowledge on this site. You are on the right path, go forth and brew!

Thank you, I'll have to check it out.
 
www.Beersmith.com has alot of user designed recipes. also buy the software, it has really helped me design some good recipes. Most of it is figuring out what grains and hops you like. Beersmith with will help with the ratios to make the beer like the style you want to make.
 
dmashl said:
www.Beersmith.com has alot of user designed recipes. also buy the software, it has really helped me design some good recipes. Most of it is figuring out what grains and hops you like. Beersmith with will help with the ratios to make the beer like the style you want to make.

Awesome. It is all seeming overwhelming here at first. I guess it just takes time, research, and enjoying the whole process.
 
Sometimes what I do is go on the beer manufacturer website....I like Summit brewing beers, go there and they will tell you what grains and hops are used, but they don't tell you how much of the ingredients they use.. Then I use beersmith to work out the numbers (IBU, Color,etc), Made the extra pale ale and one person I gave a side by side of my beer to the original. they said it tastes the same.
 
Check out the gluten free recipe section. It has some pretty good info.

I recommend 50/50 sorghum and rice syrup with some amber candi syrup. Use some honey if you want it drier. Us-05 or your favorite clean american yeast. Use an extreme hop schedule. A good start would be to look at a highly rated ipa recipe on here and use those hops. I am on a new zealand hop kick right now.

Steep some toasted grains if your feeling up to it. Your on the right track. When you are ready, post the recipe you want to use and we can help.
 
Thank you everyone for your support and great ideas. Is a one gallon carboy a good size for starting out or should I go bigger?
 
I've got two books, I'll have to get the titles though. One is like 80 Great Recipes or something like that and the other is like Designing Great Beer. Not sure exactly.
 
I know it's a little crazy but here is how I went about it and I started in about September last year:

Started by reading John Palmer's book How to Brew. He has the first edition available for free on his website. My goal here was to understand the process and chemistry behind brewing.

Next step was reading every thread in this forum, starting at the oldest ones. It gave me a great perspective on what's been tried and what has been successful and a huge number of recipes with actual numbers for bathc volumes, OG, FG and IBUs.

In between the threads I started looking at the sites reference in the threads outside of HBT. This included some techinical papers describing mashing GF grains, malting of Sorghum in Africa, alternate sources for alpha & beta amylase, and so on.

Then I bought Beersmith and started building up the recipes from the forum in Beersmith. This helped me get a sense for what actual conversions to expect, the ppg values for various gluten free grains and alternate sugars and such. If I could build out a recipe and get the same calculated OG and FG as people did, then I knew I was in the ball park.

Finally I looked around my area to figure out what resources I had available. For me Sorghum syrup is a pipe dream (it would cast me hundreds of dollars to ship enough here from North America) but rice syrup is easy to get and so are a number of certified GF grains (Millet, Buckwheat, Amaranth, Quinoa, Puffed Amaranth, Flaked Millet, Puffed Quinoa). I used a nutrition site to estimate the possible sugars from these grains, assuming the sugar value in the case that I use it as an adjunct and the total carb value for when I use it as a grain and convert with enzyme.

Since then I've been brewing roughly about twice a month, ranging from 4L to 15L batches (1gal to 4gal). The funny part is I'm still using my Martha Stewart 2gal stock pot as my brew kettle, so just about everything is a partial boil, but I've made some good brew.

Oh, recently I started watching Brewing TV on You Tube, very awesome!!

Like I said, I'm a bit cazy in that if I'm getting into a hobby I can't go part way. I need to delve deep and understand the why before I do something (hence the in depth reading) but it helps me to produce successful results that encourages me to keep going. So far I've had one disappointing batch (Chocolaty Vanilla Ale) that basically tastes like watery cider, but I know the problems and can fix it next time.

After all that, welcome to the obsession!!
 
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