Heritage Rice Amber/Red IPA--Almost All-Grain!

This is a gluten-free beer.

Brewed this yesterday:

Grain bill:
2 lbs medium-roasted red rice
2 lbs medium-roasted "forbidden" black rice
1 lb sprouted quinoa, unroasted
8 oz BRS
8 oz D-45 candi syrup
4 oz maltodextrin

Hop schedule:
~1 oz whole-leaf local organic Cascade hops, AA% unknown, at 70 minutes
~1 oz of same hops, at 20 minutes
~1 oz of same hops, at 5 minutes
Steep post-boil for 15 minutes before cooling

Yeast: S-04

Extras: 1/2 whirlfloc tablet at 15 minutes

OG: 1.046
IBUs: unknown

This was attempt #2 with beljica's Promalt enzyme blend, and this one went much better. I actually achieved close to 75% efficiency--the 5 lbs of grain gave me 4 gallons of 1.032 wort, which boiled down to 3 gallons would have been about 1.043. The OG should have been more like 1.051, but I over-diluted the wort with extra water that didn't get boiled off, because I didn't want to lose too much wort to the hops. I ended up with about 1/3 of a gallon of extra wort that wouldn't fit into the fermenter. Oh well.

I'll be writing a blog post on the process, with pics, in the next few days, but suffice to say it was really amazing to watch the mash thin out as the enzymes did their work. What started as a thick, stiff porridge rapidly turned into a thin sweet soup. The only caveat is I had to add extra amylase preparation, because I might have denatured the amylase in the promalt by having excessively-long protein and glucanase rests (30 minutes each) and heating the kettle directly instead of adding boiling water. After an hour rest at 155°F, the wort hadn't sweetened, so I added some EC Kraus "diatase", stirred vigorously and left it for two and a half hours. That did the trick!

Thus, I think a more optimal solution than Promalt would be separate enzyme blends--one for protein, one for beta-glucans, and one for starch--added at the start of each rest. When/if I get a microbrewery going, I'll be sure to pursue the more optimal solution, but for homebrewing purposes this process works perfectly. I'll be trying it again soon with some wild rice and indian corn for my Thanksgiving beer. But before that, I'm re-brewing my classic No-Nonsense Stout, with cherry extract and a few other minor tweaks.

Looking forward to the blog post, and good to hear you had success!

Fantastic! How many hours did this take? My thoughts are I won't be able to do this type of brewing until the kids are grown and Lord willing, out of the house! By then I want someone to have perfected it for me

Ha ha, yeah, I started heating the water for the cereal mash at 8 AM, and pitched the yeast by 7:55 PM. It was a LOOOOONG brew-day. In the future I may cereal-mash over night, and then mash in the morning to save some daylight.

Hey igliashon,

If one were to try this with GF quick oats would you recommend a decoction/step infusion mash or would a cereal mash suffice with the enzymes suffice?

Quick oats are pre-gelatinized, so theoretically you could just do a step-infusion mash; however, I'd hedge my bets and cereal mash anyway, and then drop to temp and add the enzymes and step-mash.

I know you said you'll do another post, but I figured I'd ask. If I understand correctly, you did a cereal mash, added promalt, did a beta-glucanase rest, did a protein rest, added diatase, did an amylase rest (normal single-infusion mash), mashed out?, and then brewed as normal.

Yep!

Cool! Thanks a lot. I've been wanting for someone to experiment more with enzymes and succeed, which it seems you did prior to fermentation. I'll be experimenting with some promalt and other enzymes in the next few months so we'll see how it goes. I'm planning on doing an all grain with unmalted grains and no other fermentables. I've done some all grain batches with malted grains, but this takes a week or so because of the malting process. I'd rather spend one whole day brewing. It'd be nice to get a couple brewers here experimenting with unmalted AG setups and see what kind of results we get and what we can share.

Bottled this yesterday. Got barely 2 gallons out of it due to mega trub loss. If anyone has pointers on how to keep from losing a gallon of beer to trub, I'm all ears. In any case, the beer was quite good...I may have detected a slight "onion" flavor in the aftertaste that could be from the hops (they're local and of unknown quality), but overall the malt flavor was smooth, clean, and light. Not like barley, but very much lacking in the sorghum twang. God willing this batch won't get infected, too...I bleach-sanitized all of my bottling equipment a few days ago, and did a PBW soak of it all before re-sanitizing with Star-San. Even did a separate cleaning of the spigot assembly. So let's hope this batch is safe...still super-bummed about the millet/banana beer, that one was going to be GOOD, dang it!

I'm pretty sure the massive trub loss is leftover, unconverted starch. I've had the same things in all of AG beers, whether the grain was malted or unmalted and converted with enzymes. My only thought are longer mash times and making sure enzymes, if used, are suspended. Otherwise, this might just have to be accounted for when brewing with GF grains.

Finally wrote that blog entry!

http://beyondbarley.blogspot.com/2013/01/how-to-mashing-and-brewing-with.html