Batch 012: Alterna Gluten Free Brown

This week I am taking a step away from the grain, away from all grain actually.  I am brewing up a gluten free beer for a friend of a friend.   I was asked if it was possible to do and I took it as a challenge to not only do it, but make a great tasting beer in the process.  I spent a good portion of the working life in kitchens and dealing with gluten allergies is becoming more and more common.  It is tough to be sure that you are actually getting gluten free food and drinks and taking a chance on whether or not it is can be risky.  I did a fair amount of research before even looking at recipes for other gluten free beers.  I learned a lot just reading up on how to do and I am sure I will learn more as this brew ferments.

The recipe:  Well this was an interesting one.  Luckily Briess makes a sorghum extract that is used for brewing gluten free beers.  I grabbed myself a can of that and started searching for what else would go in.  Through reading online I found a fair amount of posts describing how to caramelize everything from quinoa to millet to add color and a bit of flavor.  I knew a pale beer would be hard to do without it tasting like it was gluten free.  I wanted to make a gluten free beer that tasted like beer, not sorghum.  Looking through my cabinets I found the molasses I had used from St. Nick's Nog and noticed the gluten free tag on the label.  That's when I decided I would go for a brown/porter depending on the color I got out of it.  Honey is also gluten free and a tasty ingredient so 12 oz were put in.  Near the end of the boil I am adding 3oz of maltodextrin to increase the mouthfeel and thicken it up a little bit.  I looked up maltodextrin about 4 times to make absolutely sure it was gluten free and it turns out that it is so processed that it can come from wheat or barley but by the time that it makes it to the finished product it is gluten free. (reference: http://www.glutenfreeliving.com/ingredient.php#maltodextrin )  I took a similar approach to the hoping as I did with the Brew Year Brown.  I put a small charge of Centennial in just for bittering and finished off the Willamette I had for flavor.

The process: This is where things got a little interesting.  I applied a few past lessons from my burnt mead and threw the honey and molasses in the bottom of my pot with a splash of water and turned up the heat.  I cooked the honey and molasses together for about 45 minutes caramelizing the honey and molasses to give me more flavor and residual sweetness.

After it had cooked down I added back 8qts of water and started my boil.  I added 1.5 pounds of sorghum extract at the beginning of my boil and away I went.  I decided to make a larger batch (1.5ish gallons) so that I could send more than just a few bottles out and still keep a couple for myself.

 

 Everything went really well and I put the wort in a new bucket to ferment with Fermentis S-04 English yeast.  Here is the other interesting thing about gluten free ingredients.  Dry yeasts are gluten free, White Labs vials are just over the limit, but if pitching into 5 gallons of wort will dilute down to acceptable levels(if you are willing to chance that depending on the severity of the allergy), but Wyeast is not gluten free.  The liquid used to store the yeast and propagate it is a standard starter wort and thus, not gluten free.  I went with the safest option and have no problems using dry yeast.

Sidework: While brewing I also racked my American Wheat Tattoo'd Graffiti to secondary and added the first dry hop of Citra and Amarillo.  It smelled amazing and is only getting better with the hops added. I will add more next week and bottle the week after that.

This brew was important to me and I am a little upset that I kept pushing it back.  People can't control the cards they are dealt in life and I really respect the people that take it in stride and do the best that they can with what they have.  Something such as being celiac or gluten free doesn't mean you have to hide in a clean room and shut your life down.  If you want something you just have to take the extra step to find a way to make that happen.  By brewing this I hope that I can give people a nice craft beer that someone that is gluten free can enjoy, but also that someone who isn't gluten free would like to.  Below is a list of the ingredients that went in to this along with suppliers so if there is any question to whether or not something is gluten free you can know before getting sick.

Cheers!

Recipe: http://www.brewtoad.com/recipes/alterna

Briess White Sorghum Syrup 45HM Link
Brer Rabbit Full Flavor Molasses Link
Great Value Clover Honey Link
LD Carlson Maltodextrin Picture (see above link about being gluten free)
Fermentis S-04 Brewing Yeast Link
Hop Union Hops (Centennial and Willamette)

Batches 004 & 005: Black Napalm and Unnamed Blackberry Cider

This week I took a break from brewing beer to try out a few new things.  This is my first attempt at a homebrewed mead and my first true cider.  I have done some work with apple juice in the past, but always in the form of graff (a beer/cider hybrid).  Recently, BrewingTV(a production of Northern Brewer) used one of my graffs in an episode of theirs.  Check them out at www.northernbrewer.com/brewingtv if you haven't seen it.  They put out a lot of great information.

The mead.  I enjoy mead, but have never thought to make my own.  Then I found a mead I had never heard of that was completely different than the others that I had seen, bochet.  A bochet is a burnt mead, meaning you boil and caramelize the honey prior to diluting to your starting gravity.  I read online that it would taste like toasted marshmallows before fermentation, but couldn't find many descriptions of the finished product other than that it was all gone and they wished they had more.  That convinced me.  Due to the fact that you will be boiling the honey the variety won't matter as much as it would in a traditional mead.  I did a 1 1/2 gallon batch and used 6 lbs of clover honey.  Beersmith told me I would hit 1.138 OG and because of the cooking process it should end around 1.020-30, giving me a nice 14-16%ABV.  I am not going to trust Beersmith with honey any more and I will get to that later.

 The process. With pictures this time! This is a fairly straight forward process, boil until black, dilute, reheat, cool, pitch, wait.  I added my 6 lbs of honey to my 3 gallon brew pot. 

 As you can see it doesn't take up much room, for now.  Begin heating your honey, but keep an eye on it.  About 20 minutes later I was at a boil and had to quickly turn the heat down.

At this point I spent half an hour stirring to avoid a boil over and adjusting the heat to look for the sweet spot that kept it rolling, but kept the foam under control.  Soon after I was able to walk away from the pot for about 5 minutes at a time to do other things as long as I remembered to come back and give it a quick stir to knock it back down.  While it was boiling I managed to transfer St. Nick's Nog (Batch 002) to secondary and bottle up Papa's Pale Ale (Batch 001).  I also put together the cider which I will explain more below.

An hour into the boil the honey had darkened considerably, but not yet to the black that I had seen online.

Now, unfortunately after this the process kept me busy and I was unable to take more pictures.  I boiled for another hour and turned the flame off as the timer rolled past the 2 hour mark.  I gave the honey about 5 minutes to cool slightly before adding 1 gallon of water very carefully.  The water will instantly boil when it hits the hot honey so go slowly.  I mixed the honey into solution and started to heat it up again to ensure that the water was sanitized.  At about 190F I killed the heat and started the cooling process.  I took a small sample and put it in my refractometer to check the gravity.  I couldn't read it at all so I cleaned it off and did a base reading on some tap water.  0 Brix, right where it should be, so I tested the must again and still could not make out a reading.  That's when I took 1 once of tap water and mixed it in a cup with 1 once of must and tested that knowing that the gravity would be double the reading I would get.  My reading came out to 20.5 Brix, double that is 41 Brix or about 1.182 OG.  I checked this reading three more times and tried to figure out what went wrong.  I checked Beersmith one more time, 1.5 gallon batch, 6 lbs of honey =1.138.  Unfortunately I don't have anything larger than a 2 gallon fermenter so I sighed, added my yeast nutrient and started to rehydrate my yeast.  My 14-16% mead now (if the yeast allows) will be around 20%.  This has now become an experiment in making rocket fuel taste good.  Here's hoping I can make this work out.  I named this Black Napalm for a reason.  As the honey boils it will bubble up.  As those bubbles break occasionally they will spit honey out.  If your hand is in the wrong place at the wrong time, that molten honey will hit you and solidify on contact.  I only got hit once, but that was enough.  Not being able to take what is burning you off your skin is not a good situation.  With the higher gravity, I may end up naming this Black Death instead, but only time will tell.

The cider.  I hadn't really planned on doing a cider, but saw some good looking blackberries pop up at the store and thought why not.  I kept this super simple and just bought some preservative-free apple juice and the blackberries.  I smashed the berries with a potato smasher and added some pectic enzyme to help break them down and give me some good color and hopefully more flavor.  I let the enzyme work for an hour and then pour the berries into a muslin bag which was hanging in a one gallon jug.  I have made the mistake of not bagging blackberries in the past and would like not to deal with the seeds clogging every valve and tube they pass.  After that I just poured apple juice in to just above the 1 gallon mark, added yeast nutrient and my yeast and set it aside to work.  I haven't come up with a name for this one yet, but it has a wonderful dark pink/purple color.  Can't wait to try it.

So no recipes this week, just a couple wishful looks at airlocks hoping that everything turns out for the best.

Batch 002: St. Nick's Nog v2

It's that time of year again, time to brew a Christmas beer.  Last year I was a little behind and ended up bottling on Dec 21.  Not really in time to enjoy for Christmas (that and a recipe mistake made it undrinkable until about April/May).  So this year I am doing it on time and will be enjoying a bottle on Christmas day.  This is a complete rewrite of the St. Nick's Nog I brewed last year.  I wanted a med-light brown with some spice.  Everything was going great and with 10 minutes left in the boil I add 1# of honey, 2 cinnamon sticks, and 3 cloves.  I thought those spices would be about right for a 5 gallon batch.  I was wrong.  When I tasted it on bottling day there was barely any cinnamon flavor and way too much clove.  I smashed up another cinnamon stick and added to my priming sugar as I heated it on the stove.  I bottled and set them aside hoping that all would work out.  Three weeks later I opened the first bottle.  There was a great cinnamon smell and it was pretty murky, but I assumed I had gotten some sediment while pouring.  The flavor floored me.  All I could taste was clove and it penetrated every taste bud.  After only a few sips my mouth was beginning to numb and I was pouring it into the sink.  I decided to just hold on to it and see where it went.  Months later the cloves faded out and now (10 months later) it is a pretty nice beer.  So I scraped that recipe entirely and went with the following.

The beer.  Again, you can find the recipe at the bottom of this post.  I simplified my grist and decided to let the beer do its own thing instead of forcing flavors into it.  There is a handful of chocolate malt giving me my color and hopefully some nice chocolate flavors.  I am adding some dark molasses near the end of the boil.  Looking for a really deep caramel flavor and some sweetness too. I went dark to try to leave some unfermentables in the wort.  One cinnamon stick will also be added to the end of the boil.  After a 2 week primary, I will rack to a secondary fermenter and add another cinnamon stick to age for 1 week.

The process.  This week went much smoother than the last.  I mashed in fairly high at 155F to leave it sweeter.  Some of the molasses will ferment and dry this out so I compensated with a high mash temperature.  Held a steady mash temp unlike last week and proceeded to the sparge.  Last week I hit my preboil gravity, but was short on my OG.  I assumed I had just not boiled off as much as I had told my software that I would so I dropped that down this week.  I sparged to 1.25gal and started the boil.  A small bittering addition at 60 will help balance the sweetness. With ten minutes left in the boil I added my 2oz of Full Flavor molasses and one stick of cinnamon.  After cooling I took a gravity reading and overshot my estimates by about 17 points.  I then realized I was also a quart short.  I added some water to get me back to the 1 gallon mark and measured my gravity again.   After topping it up my gravity was dead on.  I have to figure out my boil off rate and get that nailed in.

So overall, I fixed my mash problems and found a boil off rate issue.  Next week that will be fixed and we will see what pops up then.

Until next week, cheers.

-Mike

Recipe: http://www.brewtoad.com/recipes/st-nicks-nog