Help me with my first gluten free brew

[hlm123]

Edit: skip here for the recipes

A little background first. My brew experience consists of several 5 gallon extract w/steeping grains. The last two came out pretty well since I found HBT and started paying more attention to the process. My interest in GF brewing: I have a mid-level sensitivity to gluten, not bad enough to keep me away from non-GF entirely. On the other hand, I have some friends and family who are entirely GF and are interested in tasting the results. Lastly, I find the openness of the field of GF brewing exciting and am looking forward to participating at some level.

The equipment I'm working with since I moved into my new place gears me towards 1 gallon batches. My brew kettle for now is just my old non-stick pot that holds about 1.5 gallons. The ingredients I have to work with are some Briess sorghum liquid extract (3.3 lbs) and maltodextrin (8 oz), raw honey (about 8 oz), and these other two that I found grocery shopping. The first one is brown rice syrup (shown here: http://www.vine.com/p/lundberg-organic-brown-rice-syrup-801097) (one jar) and some roasted/shelled whole chestnuts (shown here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004DNDBF6) (five packs).

For a 1 gallon brew I would need only a fraction of the quantities I have here, of course. I would like to use as many of these ingredients in the recipe as possible (I also have 1.5 oz Columbus hops in the fridge, and half a pack of US-05) just to see how they work.

Any suggestions for sketching out a GF recipe with these ingredients? Otherwise it will come down to pure dice-rolling when I get around to brewing. I've made up two recipes of my own so far and ended up with interesting but off-balance flavor profiles both times, so I'm really looking for help from the ground up here.

 

[BrewCanuck]

First off, Welcome!

You can look at the Recipes section for some examples of GF recipes.

What style are you looking for? What do you like?

My Basic advice would be:
- Split the Sorghum and add at least 50% late in the boil
- Add the honey late in the boil or at flameout to maintain the subtle flavours & Aromas
- The Brown Rice Syrup is usable, I think that is the same BRS that was discussed thoroughly in earlier threads in this Forum, I remember the Name Lundberg
- I haven't worked with chestnuts at all but there are more than a few threads dealing with them too. I would recommend a good rinse, fine dice then a partial mash with some enzymes.
- Have you looked at a brewing Software to help you with designing a recipe? Beersmith has a Trial package and there are some online one like Brew Toad, etc.

 

[hlm123]

Thanks for the helpful information. I spent some time looking through the recipes there and found several along the lines of the style/ingredients I had in mind. My thought is now to make two 2.5-gal batches, one a pale ale based mainly on the chestnuts (I'd never thought my first mash attempt would be GF) plus maltodextrin, and the other a saison based mainly on sorghum extract, with honey and oats. I'll update with recipes once I get them ready, that is once I can figure out how to use this Beersmith software.

(By the way, great link to the ginger beer recipe in your sig. I've been looking to make my first ginger beer and never found a recipe that looked very promising.)

 

[jeffz]

I made quite a few good GF brews with the Lundberg's brown rice syrup. If you use a recipe calculator like Brewtoad (was Hopville), I just enter it as if it's the Briess Brown Rice Syrup, which it's apparently close enough to. I get color & gravity results that match what's predicted.

Jeff

 

[Tex60]

The longer you boil the sorghum the more the off taste comes out if it is sealed in a container then add your sorghum at 20min to go it is sterile so it does not need to be boiled for any more than jus to dissolve it.

 

[BrewCanuck]

Beersmith can be a little overwhelming at first but I think its awesome. The oats should add a little body to your Saison but you might get a Little starch haze.

The ginger beer was good, not real traditional since I didn't use a Ginger Beer Plant but it came out tasty. I ended up Splitting the Batch and adding 50g of Maltodextrin to half. I wanted to see the difference and the Maltodextrin Batch was better. More heavy on the tongue.

When I do it again I think I'll make sure to peel the ginger and cut it up a little finer. There was some bitterness/astringentcy (sp?) that I think came from the ginger root peel. I think I'll add more ginger as well, ginger burst as it were, as if it were an IPA.

We'll see what I get up to. I'm sidelined until about Feb from brewing. We're moving back to Canada in Dec and all my gear is going to be on a boat plus I have a stockpile to get through before we leave.

Good luck, post up your recipes if you Need any help.

BC

 

[hlm123]

Thanks for the all the additional info.

I went ahead and brewed the Gluten Free Ale kit yesterday. I wasn't able to find any threads related to brewing it, so I thought I'd post the recipe and share some results here. Not sure what I was expecting, but it's just like brewing any other extract recipe.

6.6 lbs white sorghum syrup (tasty stuff)
1 lb golden Belgian candi syrup
8 oz maltodex

1 oz Cascade (60 min)
0.5 oz Cascade (15 min)
0.5 oz Cascade (flame-out)

"Spice pack" with bitter orange peel, lemon peel, and whirlfloc (15 min)
1 pack dry Windsor ale yeast.

I had to make a run to the store during the final 15 min boil and ended up letting the boil go an extra 4 minutes, which I'm hoping won't affect the flavor or color too much. The wort came out light golden and tasting very much like beer, and it hit the 1.058 mark. Much worse, however, was that I ended up pitching the yeast at way too high a temperature, something in the mid to high 80s. I've never done that before, so I'm wondering how likely that is to create any problems. (Fermentation started within 3 hours and seems to be going at a normal rate.) I was hoping this batch would turn out well so my GF acquaintances who are deeply suspicious of beer might have a change of heart.

[Update: turned out really well. Probably the clearest and cleanest tasting beer I've made. ]

 

[glutarded-chris]

The kit sounds like the Brewer's Best Ale Kit. I purchased that one because I saw it in my LHBS and wanted to make sure that I supported them when they provided GF options. I ended up really liking it and it made me realize the importance of the belgian candy syrup and the maltodextrin. Also started using corriander and dried orange peel in some of my other batches as a result.

I also fermented mine at too high a temperature, right around 80F (AC thermostat failed while I was away for the first week). It not only came out good it fermented out better than other batches with Windsor and Nottingham yeast that I fermented down at 72F. I expect it will come out fine and you will really like it!

For later batches consider also using some steeped millet and/or buckwheat crystal. Colorado Malting Company has it.

 

[hlm123]

I've divided the ingredients into 4 1 gallon recipes. I went ahead and brewed this today:

"GF Honey Saison" (1-gal)
8 oz GF rolled oats (steep)
8 oz sorghum syrup (30 min)
8 oz sorghum syrup (5 min)
6 oz raw honey (5 min)

.25 oz US Saaz (30 min)
.25 oz German Hallertau (5 min)

.75 oz candied ginger (5 min)
.5 oz sweet orange peel (5 min) (a little overboard on these two)

and ~1/4 tsp gypsum and Irish moss

1 full vial of WLP565 Saison

I did a 30 min boil in a very inexpensive 3 gal kettle I found at the grocery store for doing small brews. I vastly underestimated boil off, which ended up being around 40% if I reckoned it right. With Brewtoad I had an estimated OG = 1.050, IBU = 21, and color = 2*L.

The question I had was, how confident could I be that this will be completely GF? Not for myself, but for certain family members who won't consume anything prepared on non-GF counter-space(!). I'm thinking of the vial of White Labs yeast in particular.

[Update: turned out pretty well. It fermented close to radiator heat and went through all kinds of temp changes. The flavor profile is complex even for a saison. When I open the last bottle I'll update this with notes.

]

 

[hlm123]

glutarded-chris, definitely looking into trying out other GF grains for future brews.

Here's how I divided up the rest of my present stock of ingredients into three more 1 gallon recipes:

"Chestnut Bitter"
2 lbs roasted/shelled chestnuts (mash) (expecting low ppg here)
1 lb rolled oats (mash)
4 oz maltodextrin (boil)

.25 oz Columbus (30 min)
.75 oz Columbus (5 min)
1 oz Chinook (dry hop for 1 week after 2 weeks in primary)

1/2 pack S-04

[Update: didn't get much conversion here. Screwed up by not doing cereal mash on the oats. Hard to tell exactly what I got out of the chestnuts. Very light/crisp, too little chestnut flavor to reach any conclusions, but at least there was no sorghum extract twang.

]

"GF Wit"

8 oz rolled oats (steep)
12 oz sorghum syrup (30 min)
2 oz maltodextrin (30 min)
20 oz sorghum syrup (5 min)

.5 US Saaz (15 min)

1 tsp each sweet orange peel and coriander (5 min)

1/2 pack T-58

(Predicted ABV is 6.8% for this one.)

"GF Czech Pils"
1.5 lbs brown rice syrup (45 min)
2 oz maltodextrin (45 min)

.25 German Hallertau (45 min)
.25 US Saaz (10 min)
.5 German Hallertau (1 min)

1 vial WLP800 Pilsner Lager

 

[glutarded-chris]

I would do some research on the yeast you are using. I think the dry yeast is usually gluten free and the liquid yeast may not be. Safale, saflager, Windsor, Nottingham dry yeasts are gluten free.

I plan on using oats and already purchased some for that purpose but have not got around to including it in a batch. Seems most of the posted recipes that use oats are people trying to achieve a dark beer like a stout. Are you cereal mashing your oats? I think like Buckwheat, if you don't boil it for 10 or so minutes before the regular mash then you just get too much starch in the wart.

For the batch with chestnuts, did you add amylase and pectinase? I followed the instructions on the Chestnut Trails site and my batch turned out tasting petty close to a couple of the Harvester brews. A lot of people really like the chestnut beer taste, but I realized after my batch and tasting Harvester, that I don't. Personal preference. Interested to hear what you think after your test batch.

For your GF Czech Pils, you may want to substitute some sorghum LME for part of the brown rice syrup. I think the rice syrup by itself does not have enough FAN and other stuff for proper fermentation. Then again, in the spirit of testing, go for it and see how it works out. If you find it to be a little thin and lacking, then substitute some LME for rice syrup, maybe 1 lb LME and 0.5 lb rice syrup.

 

[BrewCanuck]

The liquid yeast is usually grown on barley malt, meaning that it is a source of gluten contamination. I know somewhere in this subforum someone calculated it out to be about 2ppm in a 5gal Batch. So you can assume that you've probably got some gluten contamination though.

Keep in mind that the FDA has ruled that Foods with less than 20ppm can be labeled "Gluten Free" so technically you are probably gluten free but I would inform your drinkers and let them make the choice.

 

[hlm123]

Starting my chestnut beer tonight. I opened up the packages of roasted/shelled chestnuts, found they had a pasty texture and tasted/smelled amazingly like an LME. Crumbled them up into small pieces and just started the mash with a pound of oats at around 165*F with a little over 0.5 tsp amylase. (I haven't looked into cereal mashing at this point. Also, based on what I read in one of the chestnut threads, it seems that the pectinase may not be effective above something like 113*F? I didn't know if that was true or not so I added in a little bit, but I'm planning on adding the main part of it after the boil.) I'm going to do a 12-hour mash (or what I hope is a mash; I'm really riding blind here) keeping it in the oven set to ~150* overnight. Then I strain through a grain bag into the kettle and fill to my boil volume. Sounds about right? Reading the chestnut threads it seems like people were getting all kinds of mash efficiencies.

 

[hlm123]

I can see the need for doing a cereal mash using oats now. I ended up getting about 12 gravity points from the chestnuts according to the calculations on Brewtoad (based on the estimated yield from the oats and maltodextrin, more precisely).

I seem to have run into some of the same problems as this brewer: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f164/gf-chestnut-oat-beer-251516/. I'm not sure how effective the amylase was over the 12 hour mash and I'm not sure at what temperature but I tried to keep it around 165.

Anyway, I doubt I'll be purchasing chestnuts in this expensive form again, so I'm not sure how valuable this experiment could be since it's not going to be repeated. I probably should have mashed the chestnuts alone, so I could see the results of that apart from the oat starch. But in this spirit, I think Ill go ahead and use BRS as the only fermentable (with maltodextrin) in the Pilsner.

 

[glutarded-chris]

My first guess is that the suspended material is due to the oats and not the chestnuts. The chestnut batch I brewed came out clearer than my extract only batches, and that was not because I did a great job. I just steeped with amylase and pectinase as directed by the supplier recipe: http://www.chestnuttrails.com/pages/chestnut-beer
I got no paste at all. The roasted and flaked chestnuts yielded a deep brown clear wart which I boosted with corn sugar and small amount of LME.

I am no expert, but it looks like your mashing temperature is a little high. I think amylase needs the temperature to be in the 145 to 158F and it starts to have trouble over 160F. In the link above, they have their strike water above 160F but the chestnuts bring it down quickly to the mid to low 150's where it needs to be.

The chestnuts are expensive, no doubt. I don't like the taste they give, but others really like it including my wife. I would not abandon them unless you establish that you don't care for them. If you like the flavor, you can always use them in small quantities to add some flavor.