Paleo Beer Questions

I'm fairly new to homebrewing and to the website, and I have a couple of questions about a possible paleo beer. I think paleo has been explained a little bit on a few other threads, but basically the major issue with brewing a paleo beer is that I can't have any grains. Does anyone know of a good substitute for grains in brewing?

After looking around at the site, some of the ideas I've come up with that may fit the bill...

• Doing a cider of some sort using fresh apples and honey to sweeten.
• I think I could get away with using natural Sorghum and Sorghum Syrup, but I've never used those in a recipes before. I saw a pumpkin recipe that sounded delicious, but it called for baking the Sorghum. Not sure what the natural state of Sorghum is, but it sounds like a grain.
• I could do a mead or wine, but I'm really more of a beer person.
• I really like the idea of a pumpkin beer. Can I do a beer with no grains and pumpkin?

If there's already an active thread that discusses these issues, I would really appreciate a link.

There are 2 worst case scenarios in my opinion for not finding any substitutes, and neither is that terrible. The first is that I just brew the beer I like and have it on my cheat days. The second is that I just try a little bit of chemistry and see what I get. :cross: Any suggestions or hints would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers!

Considered lambics and meads, perhaps? You don't get more Stone Age than leaving a bucket of fruit squish or honey water around until magic (i.e. wild yeast) turns it into booze.

Hey. I'm actually paleo too so it's nice to have a fellow paleo here. Check out my stout that I brewed https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f164/gf-american-stout-264594/ It's a little involved if you've never brewed anything before. I'd suggest edwort's apfelwein as a starter. I brewed a modified pumpkin spice which I tried for the first time a few hours ago. For that, I'd suggest this recipe here http://brew.dkershner.com/2009/gluten-free-pumpkin-spice-ale/ It's pretty tasty, but, as a personal note, I don't do great with sorghum. I don't get bloated like I do with sorghum, but I get a different sort of drunk. Look in the sticky about malting your own gf grains and check out some of my other questions/posts. Personally, I seem to do well with malted buckwheat, but it is a lot more work, especially for your first brew. I'm with you though. I'm still learning but if you have any questions feel free to PM me.

just a thought.....

If you don't have an allergy to grains or celiac, and are just doing this as a diet because it feels good to you.

then what is it about converting grain starches to sugars and the converting those sugars to alcohol that is different than taking other starches and converting them to sugar and then converting them to alcohol?

@dramirezpa To be honest, for mre it's really more of an experiment. I can tell you that eating different starches makes me feel totally different. So, I'm really trying to see if brewing a different type of beer makes me feel any different.

To the rest of you, thanks for the info. If I try anything, I'll make sure to post it here.

+1 to EdWort's apfelwein.

Synapsis said:

@dramirezpa To be honest, for mre it's really more of an experiment. I can tell you that eating different starches makes me feel totally different. So, I'm really trying to see if brewing a different type of beer makes me feel any different.

To the rest of you, thanks for the info. If I try anything, I'll make sure to post it here.

Click to expand...

I'm not trying to be an instigator, just curious. If your mash passes the iodine test there are no starches in the wort, right?

Mead, wine, cider. Honey & fruit.
Sorghum, millet, rice, which we gluten free brewers use are grains. Thus off limits.

In order to convert any other item, including grain, into sugar, you have to have enzymes. Ideally both alpha and beta (and gamma?) enzymes. We gluten free people have issues sourcing the enzymes, (alpha can be found, beta, not so much.)

It's possible to use pumpkin or sweet potato and convert those to sugar. You may need to include an enzyme amount. This would usually be from grain. There are a lot of articles this time of month about pumpkin beer and it's history.
There's pumpkin beer, which is made from pumpkin, but may be more akin to a wine.
And then there's pumpkin beer that people are more familiar with which may not contain any pumpkin at all. Just spice that makes people think of pumpkin pie.
http://drinks.seriouseats.com/2011/...y-to-seasonal-treat-beer-history-brewing.html
This includes links to old books that reference pumpkin beer made from only pumpkin. Including a book from the 80's that references an article from 1771 saying to juice a pumpkin, boil the juice add hops and ferment like malt.

Which reminds me that I need to juice my pie pumpkin to flavor my GF spiced beer.

If you truly want to go paleolithic. Get a dried, hollowed out gourd, or cured animal skin as a pouch, add squished fruit, and let it naturally ferment.

I'm on my third batch of paleo friendly beer.

Ingredients for 5 gal batch

Roasted buckwheat (is actually a fruit seed that is related to rhubarb and sorrel making it a suitable substitute for grains)
2 lbs of coconut palm sugar (takes a lot longer to ferment)
4 lbs organic non-gmo beet sugar
small bottle of molasses
1 pack extra dark candi syrup (made with dates)

Yeast - london ale (why - that's what I had in the fridge

Hops of choice

First batch I steeped 2 lbs large flake roasted coconut for flavor. Came out pretty good.

Paleo-wise, why are buckwheat seeds fine and cereal grains bad, since mankind was cultivating various grains thousands of years before anyone ever planted buckwheat, and harvesting them in the wild for thousands of years before that?

Also: why is sugar from dates acceptable, but not sugar from sugar cane or beets?

It seems to me common guidelines for a paleo diet are rather arbitrary and illogical.... and that people have unrealistic ideas about what our hunter-gatherer ancestors did and didn't eat. They were omnivores; they ate pretty much anything that didn't eat them first -including wheat, rice, and other grain.

add: I'm not trying to start yet another paleo war. As I've said before: if it's a diet that works for you, have at it. But it seems to me the rationales behind it are pretty shaky. Example: the early whites to arrive in North America almost universally commented on what strong, healthy people the Indians were (the ones that didn't die from newly-introduced diseases, anyway). Yet a major part of most Indian diets was corn, which is strictly verboten in paleo because it's a grain...

I know. Wild grains were on the paleo diet for 10's of thousands of years. That's why we have civilization now,is because they settled down to grow more grains to brew more beer. Although some ancient cultures used long straws to suck the beer out of a big container of fermented grains. Now that's paleo. Study the real workings of the paleo diet first.

I just did my first cider, since fresh apples aren't in season here I went with mangrove jack's cider kit, it is incredible. I have given bottles to half a dozen friends & family and everyone has loved it so far. One improvement I would suggest is make sure to add a yeast nutrient because cider doesn't have the same nutrients & the yeast won't flocculate and come out of solution lol...

still tastes fine and no yeast cake develops at the bottom of the bottle but it is cloudy and it finished out at 1.017 f.g. from an original 1.060 which I believe I let go for 5 weeks without a secondary before I bottled it. I added about 5oz dextrose in hopes that it would carbonate and am happy with the results.

The reason why the paleo diet does not include grains is not because of gluten. It is because the purification process does not take away the germ. The germ contains nutrients to the grain itself and antinutrients which the plant uses as a defence mechanism to fend of animal grazing.

The antinutrients and excess fibre is believed to compromise the biofilm of bacteria and damage eucaryotic cells in your gut, causing leaky gut syndrome. This condition allows other toxins to pass through the guts natural barrier and cause all sorts of badness by entering your bloodstream. Often when combined with refined and synthetic sugar, it will cause a lot of inflammation.

This is why it is ok to eat rice, but not other grains, though the nutritional value of rice is pretty low compared to the plethora of vegetables.

So choose your food carefully and do your research before

Maby the reason you haven't heard of this, and the lack of explanation for the lifestyle (because it's not really a diet) is the amount of knowledge needed to understand it. It would be easier if you just read about it and did the research yourself instead of someone using like 3 hours to explain why