roasting vs. toasting grains

Has anyone seen this? http://grantsglutenfreehomebrew.webs.com/roastingthegrains.htm

I call his method toasting just to differentiate from the usual putting it in the oven and slowly increasing the temperature. Anyone else ever tried this and if so, does it work?

The picture of his Brown Ale looks pretty good.

I'm kind of surprised that it took me so long to stumble across this thread...

This guy seems to have a slightly different approach to gluten free brewing than what's common on here, but that picture of the brown ale is absolutely beautiful.

I might scale this down to one gallon and give it a shot with some fuggle hops and Windsor or S04.

Thanks for posting!

I've toasted grains in a frying pan before. Seemed to work just fine, not sure why it's not practiced more frequently.

His recipe is quite different than anything I've seen here:

Ingredients (supplied):

500g of buckwheat kernels
20g of Pride of Ringwood hop pellets
2kg of maltodextrin (from maize)
850g of Treacle
1 packet of English Ale yeast

Click to expand...

Converted to lbs, it would be:

1.1 lbs buckwheat
2 lbs treacle
4.5 lbs maltodextrin (!!!)
0.7 oz Pride of Ringwood hop pellets

Holy carp! 4.5 lbs of maltodextrin?? Does that make sense to anyone? Seems to me like this beer would have a very low ABV, since only the 2 lbs of treacle would be contributing fermentables.

I toasted some 2 row yesterday..they smell like peanuts..is that normal?

Volume mostly. It's easier to do larger quantities of grain in an oven (or similar roaster) than it would be on the stovetop. Plus you get to set a target temperature (kind of). And with a slower toast, it's easier to halt at the desired roast.

Then too, the slower heat transfer may do something, compared to the faster roast of the stovetop process. (If coffee is any judge). Which has also made me wonder what fluid bed roasts would do. (Other than popping sorghum, which was a tasty snack when it finished.)

Don't know beerhound, this is the gluten free area, so I wouldn't know anything about barley.