GF Raspberry Blonde

[QuercusMax]

Last night I brewed what I hope is a Blonde with grains from the Colorado Malting Company, once again with no added enzymes.

Grains:
3 lb White Millet Malt
.5 lb GF Oatmeal (Trader Joe's, if anyone cares)
.5 lb Light Crystal Buckwheat malt (home-caramelized)
5oz Medium/Dark Crystal Millet (what I had leftover from the Mild I made)

Hops:
.4oz Mt Hood 6.1% @60
.25oz Mt Hood 6.1% @20
.25oz Mt Hood 6.1% @5

Yeast: US05 (repitched slurry)
Yield: 2 gallons of 1.049 wort.

The crystal buckwheat didn't get very sweet. I think maybe I didn't steep and mash it long enough. It smelled really when I was roasting it, though - it went from a very strong buckwheat smell, to finally smelling more like sweet potatoes at the end.

Last time I tried grinding my grains in a food processor, which was a miserable failure. This time I used my Blendtec (Will it blend? Yes!) which did a great job. The first batch in the blender got completely pulverized into a fine flour, so I didn't do the rest quite so much. I'm definitely glad I'm doing BIAB.

I did the double-infusion single-reverse-decoction described here, which worked great aside from it being a 3.5 hour mash. Again, I'm very glad I did BIAB since it would have been horrendously stuck otherwise.

My initial preboil gravity was 15brix, so I added quite a bit of extra water preboil to get it down to my final postboil gravity of 12.2brix (=1.049).

I'm planning on adding 1.5oz of Raspberry extract at bottling time.

In the future I'm going to try adding some corn to get some extra fermentables - the millet enzymes seem to do a great job of conversion if you can get the starches properly exposed and gelatinized. It think I got around 22.6 PPG from my grains, which is pretty respectable. Does anyone know the PPG of millet at 100% extraction? I'm guessing no... I think I was probably at around 85% efficiency.

 

[igliashon]

Do you find that you get a lot of trub in the fermenter with these beers? I've been thinking about placing an order in to CMC for some millet and quinoa and trying some mashes without added enzymes (I've just been cereal-mashing everything and then adding enzymes), since I BIAB too and I think I've come up with an "easy" decoction method using two kettles, but so far all of my AG brews have had almost a gallon of trub.

 

[QuercusMax]

I don't believe I got that much trub on my previous batch. This one was very cloudy, though, and may end up with a fair bit of sediment at the bottom. I'll post my results here.

 

[Sheldon]

did a raspberry hefe, really clear for a hefe and tastes to me like a raspberry spritzer, but I have had some good reviews from folks.

Cheers,

Sheldon

 

[QuercusMax]

What did you do for the raspberry flavor? I do GF brews for my wife, and she liked the New Planet raspberry beer, which tasted kind of like raspberry soda to me. So if it ends up like that, mission accomplished!

I may bottle half with raspberry and half plain... That way I can try both ways.

 

[Sheldon]

I used a large can of puree in secondary for a week.

 

[Osedax]

I have used the red millet from CMC. That's around 21 ppg. The white millet seems to be considerably more. What was the pre-boil volume? Quick oats are in the low 30s ppg and you probably didn't get much out of the two crystal malts. I'm going to guess like 27-28 ppg for the millet. Have you dialed in your system by other means? Most BIAB is like 60-65% efficiency.

Either way, this is awesome. I wonder what the taste difference is between red and white millet?

Voile will really help with the trub. http://biabbags.webs.com/ is offering free shipping right now. I made my own but, same thing.

Keep this updated.

 

[QuercusMax]

My system typically gets 85% or better efficiency with BIAB - I do a 3-vessel BIAB batch sparge. Preboil was around 3.5 gallons, but I actually had to top that up preboil since my first runnings were 19brix, and combined it was 15.5ish before dilution. I probably could have gotten a teensy bit more by cold water sparging a third time instead of just topping up.

 

[max42]

My system typically gets 85% or better efficiency with BIAB - I do a 3-vessel BIAB batch sparge. Preboil was around 3.5 gallons, but I actually had to top that up preboil since my first runnings were 19brix, and combined it was 15.5ish before dilution. I probably could have gotten a teensy bit more by cold water sparging a third time instead of just topping up.

Can you describe what you do for a 3-vessel BIAB batch sparge?

 

[QuercusMax]

Can you describe what you do for a 3-vessel BIAB batch sparge?

I made a separate thread last night: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f36/my-3-vessel-biab-ag-technique-399561/

 

[QuercusMax]

I bottled this last night. Two weeks ago I added 24oz of raspberries (frozen, I cooked them on the stove to sanitize). I ended up only getting 1.25 gallons due to massive amounts or trub and raspberry crud. But it tastes really nice and is a great purple color.

 

[QuercusMax]

So far my wife has tried two of them, of which I've only been allowed brief and tiny sips. The first was a carbonation sample, which she described as "raaaalllly good", and proceded to chug. It's got a great pinkish-orange color. It gets a good head going, but it doesn't last. Decent amount of body, great raspberry flavor. The hops shine through to a small degree, but the raspberry dominates, which isn't bad. I could probably pass this off as a raspberry wheat.