Help Me, I'm Gluten Free...

I have celiac disease and my boyfriend is fantastic enough to brew strictly gluten free for me.Two weeks ago we attempted our first ever home brew(gluten free or not). The process went well, we had a lot of fun but we are not so sure if we did everything right. Here is our first recipe (sorry if my terminology is not up to par...we're new):

5# White sorghum syrup
3# Malted, toasted, cracked quinoa
4oz Cascade hops
1oz Glacier hops
Nottingham ale yeast
Irish moss
corn sugar

We heated 2 gallons of water to about 160F and steeped our quinoa for about 20 min. Then we brought it to a boil and added the sorghum extract. We added 2.5 oz cascade and 1 oz glacier and boiled for 60 min. at 45min we added a tbsp Irish moss and at 55min we added 1.5 oz of cascade for finishing.

Then we cooled it quickly and moved it to the carboy to ferment, we took an OG reading of 1.040, we have no idea if this is good or bad. It seemed to us like the chances of our beer having a decent alcohol percentage is low.

Is is possible we did not have enough fermentable sugars? We were thinking about possibly adding some honey at flame-out for the sugars?


We were eager to start and failed to read as much as we should of on home brewing. Our wort smelled phenomenal but it's looking skeptical to me now. We are just looking for any advise on brewing and what we can do better. Please help us out. I just want a delicious IPA and Stout at least once in my life.

Any information is helpful please!!

hey mate
try reposting this in the gluten free brewing area


Cheers!

Personally, I think it looks pretty good. The others will chime in, and you should really have this in the gluten free area. We're glad to have more gluten free brewers.
I think there will be some people who will want to see if you removed the toasted quinoa after the steeping process.
The OG seems a tad low, American Lager/Blonde Ale low, but not horribly low. The BJCP (categorization of beers) shows some lagers are as low as 1.028, but there are quite a few ales that fit in the 1.040 OG, and some of the IPAs list 1.040 as a lower limit. The more experienced people will give you a better reading, but I'd guess it'd be somewhere from 3.5-4.0% ABV. From what I'm reading, it won't be as much an English or American IPA as much as it would be an English bitter.

Check out Lcasanova's Double chocolate stout in the GF forum.
I'm aiming at doing something like that, but I'm going to do something different with my oats and I really want to get the chocolate nibs in mine.

Personally, when I'm doing IPAs, I prefer 1.4 pounds per gallon (7 pounds per 5 gallons), but that's just so far until I get more experience.

Thanks so much for replying, I re-posted in the gluten free area also. I will add that we did indeed take the steeped grains out after 20 min.