GF "Mounds Bar" Mild

I'm brewing this right now - more updates to follow.

This is based on Jamil Zainascheff's Mild, with some inspiration from
Kona Brewing's Koko Brown. My wife, who is GF, tried sips of both of those,
and really liked both of them, and has been bugging me to make her some
"chocolate beer". I've made the Simple Simon Sorghum Ale with the Briessweet
syrup using the recipe from Briess, and I just bottled a Sorghum-Honey
Clementine Wit, both of which seem to be reasonable beers, but I wanted
to do something more hands-on, using real malted grains.

I purchased GF Millet Malt and Buckwheat Malt from the Colorado Malting
Company a few weeks ago, and I made my own crystal millet malt and
chocolate buckwheat malt. Additionally, I toasted some GF steel-cut oats
and some shredded sweetened coconut.



All-Grain BIAB. Shooting for about a 2-gallon batch, with OG of
1.030-1.040, depending on efficiency.

Grain Bill:

2.5 lb Millet Malt
.62 lb Crystal Millet Malt (approx 120L?)
.25 lb Chocolate Buckwheat Malt
.25 lb Toasted Steel-cut oats
.25 lb Oatmeal

Hops:
.38oz US Goldings 4.4%@60mins
.2oz US Goldings 4.4%@5mins
3oz toasted coconut at flame-out.
1/4 whirlfloc tab for 5 minutes.

Yeast: Safale US05. I'd prefer US04, but I don't have any spare packets,
and I just pitched my saved yeast a few days ago.

I ran the grains through my food processor, since I wasn't sure how
my corona mill would handle them, and I didn't feel have time to clean out the
barley dust. I "conditioned" the millet malts first by spraying them with water
and mixing by hand, since I was concerned about the dust (and the husks
tend to fly everywhere, and stick to things with static cling). They
didn't get quite as fine as I'd like, but definitely got some crush to them.
Next time I'll probably mill them, though.

I attempted to dough-in with 5 quarts for an initial mash temp of around 122,
but overshot and ended up at 132. I let it sit for about 20-30 minutes,
during which time it dropped to 126. Then I scopped out 4 quarts of the
thickest part of the mash (using the rule of thumb of 1 quart per pound
of grain), and brought it to a boil and boiled for about 10-15 minutes.
I added back in the decoction and stirred it thoroughly to get the mash
back to around 154, but I had to give it some heat from my stove burner.
I put it in the oven to mash for 30 minutes, took it out, stirred it,
and put it back in for another 20 minutes.

Mash finished, before mash-out:


I then added my 180* mashout water and drained my bag, then dunk-sparged
in my brew kettle. The Preboil gravity was 6.5 brix, a little lower than
I was hoping - for comparison, when I brewed the original recipe, my
preboil gravity was 10 brix.

After half an hour of boiling, the gravity has risen to 7.8 brix.

Very interested in how this turns out. Will this work without added enzymes or yeast nutrient? What is your mash ph?

I do worry about the coconut addition a little. I remember seeing a thread on here in the past that suggested that the fats in coconut can cause some problems in the finished product.

No yeast nutrient or enzymes. I figure the millet should probably provide what's needed. I didn't check my ph, maybe I will next time.

As for the coconut, I'm not leaving it in. I waited 10 minutes after the boil to start my chiller, and I'm going to strain the hops and coconut with my BIAB bag.

It looks and smells great.

Final gravity appears to be 8.5 brix = 1.034, which is about what I was shooting for. In terms of volume, however, I didn't get as much as the original recipe - I'd estimate 1.5 gallons. Does anybody know what the ridges correspond to on a 3 gallon carboy?

Have you considered toasting some more coconut and racking the beer onto it for a week. Kind of "dry coconutting"

There was a thread on here a while back where somebody did 3 techniques with a coconut brown - in boil, post boil, and dry 'nutting. Their taste tests preferred post-boil. If this comes out good but needs more coconut, I'll try it next time around.

Additionally, I think I will try using some amylase, but I'm not sure how much it will help, since I think I got pretty good extraction considering the low proportion of starch to hull in millet. Probably add some rice syrup if I need to, to get my volume/gravity where I want, as next time I want to do more of a brown ale instead of a mild.

Judging by the picks, it looks like your grains didn't get very well gelatinized. I think if you do a finer crush and a couple more decoctions, you might get an even better extraction. Just FYI, I use a corona mill to crush millet, rice, quinoa, etc., and it works great...but you really need to futz with tightening the plate just right, a few degrees' turn of the screw makes the difference between "no crush at all" and "flour".

You're probably right about the poor gelatinization. Next time I definitely will use my mill on the grains, and I probably didn't boil them long enough, either. I didn't use quite a big enough pot for my decoction and had trouble stirring it.

Last night was a highly chaotic brew session, as my kids really didn't want to go to bed, and I was concerned about scorching my decoction. All things considered I'm pretty happy, since this only my fourth all-grain batch (sixth BIAB batch total, since I've been also been doing 5-gallon mini-mashes with half of the gravity coming from extract), and my second batch with self-milled grains.

I need to figure out a good way to thoroughly clean my corona - I guess I could probably just disassemble and rinse with water, then thoroughly dry it out to prevent rusting, and rinse out my grinding bucket too. (I have mine mounted inside a bucket to contain flying grain bits.) Gonna be a pain, though.

If I end up doing a lot of GF brewing, I might just spring for a second corona/bucket setup, since it probably cost me about $30, total ($25 corona mill from Discount Tommy, $5 for bucket, lid, bolts, and washers.).

$30 dollars seems like a small amount of money to pay to not risk making your wife sick. I'd go for a new set if I were you.

She's not deathly allergic or anything, and will occasionally (every few weeks or so) eat wheat-containing soy sauce, and I use the same set of brewing equipment for GF and regular beer. It's mainly a matter of how much hassle I'm going to put up with personally. I had to do a decent amount of modification to the corona mill I have now - it wasn't extremely well cast, and I had to put in a significant amount of elbow grease to make it run smoothly. In the short run, thoroughly cleaning my mill is probably less effort than setting up a new one. I anticipate for the forseeable future I'll be doing only one GF batch for every 5 regular batches.

Additionally, my wife did try one of the "gluten-reduced" Omission beers from Widmer without any noticeable effects, so I'll probably make a few batches with Clarity-Ferm to see how she does with those.

I don't trust those "gluten reduced" things -- my wife didn't have side effects before she found out she was celiac. Just because people don't feel effects post-consumption of small amounts doesn't mean the intestinal damage doesn't ocurr. My wife is a physician and checks her own levels regularly. There is a correlation between antibody levels and how "careful" she has been recently. The gluten reduced stuff or a little soy sauce here and there doesnt make her sick but does cause a chemistry change. FWIW the antibody increase isn't that large, her levels tend to go from "high side of normal" to "slightly elevated" if she has some stuff she shouldn't.

I think coconut extract is the way to go. All the flavor, none of the fats.

I think fermentation is just about done. I checked the gravity and it appears to be around 1.013, resulting in ~3%ABV.

It tastes pretty similar to what I was shooting for, so I'm pretty happy there. There's a slightly harsher burnt flavor from the chocolate malt, but I think that will mellow out with a little more time. Not getting much coconut, though. They sell "coconut rum flavor essence" at my LHBS - do you think that would be good? Or should I just get coconut extract from the grocery store?

My wife bought a 4-pack of the New Planet 3R Raspberry GF Beer, and seems to enjoy it quite a bit. I think my next GF beer will probably be a raspberry pale ale.

I bottled this last night, and gave my wife a sample while I was racking into the bottling bucket. She tried it and said it was good, but needed carbonation. Then asked if it was gluten free. I'd say that's pretty successful. Probably means I'm going to need to brew more of it.

Tried the first bottle (way early, I know, but I didn't use much priming sugar since this style gets low carbonation) tonight. Here's a picture side-by-side with the original:



It generally needs more of everything- body, sweetness, head, color. I think improving my crush and doing a second decoction will help. It has a slight sour finish, but it's quite good. By itself I wouldn't complain, but compared with the barley version it is clearly inferior. The coconut isn't even detectable at all.

Tagging, this is the first time I've seen a GF recipe succeed with no additional enzymes or sorghum

Neat that you can pull this off using a decoction and just millet, really...

It is malted millet, but yeah. And my crush really sucked, as you can see from my pictures above. The guy from Colorado Malting told me I should use amylase, but I decided to try without it, and I may continue unless I'm using adjuncts.