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Brewing Gluten-Free Beer

Autor:   •  July 15, 2017  •  Creative Writing  •  1,468 Words (6 Pages)  •  649 Views

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Brewing Gluten-free Beer

On this page, we shall discuss brewing gluten free beer using malts made from sorghum as our base malt. The main problem we have in brewing with gluten free grains is their high gelatinisation temperature (higher than normal mash temperatures), hence a normal infusion mash will not work. Another problem is sorghum has no husks, so you need to add rice hulls (or a similar medium) so a filter bed can be formed, thus avoiding your sparge "getting stuck".

Gluten free beer, like any other beer can be made with adjuncts. Logically, you should use gluten free adjuncts. For example, you could add rice or corn syrup, or add molasses to provide colour and taste, or by even making a hopped mead. Recipe formulation is only limited by your imagination.

Ingredients

Malts, and grains

Of all the gluten free grains available, I personally have concentrated on malting sorghum and buckwheat. I can see no reason why similar techniques should not work with other grains. Some "grains" (the term here I will use for any gluten free seed that can be used) have natural problems that can make malting a real challenge, such as millet, amaranth and quinoa. These plants have very small seeds and this will make malting difficult, but not impossible.

Sorghum makes a good base malt. The diastatic power of sorghum malt is quite low (compared to barley), so you can not use a lot of roasted malts or adjuncts with it (15% seems to be the upper limit). Sorghum malt needs to be ground quite finely to get a good rate of conversion. Remember, you will be adding rice hulls for a filter bed, so you can grind the grain very fine.

Buckwheat also makes a reasonable malt but imparts a strong buckwheat flavour to the beer if used at too high a rate. I have found up to 30% additions is fine. I have found a better use for this malt is to use it as a roast malt, to give your beer colour and flavour. It has a husk and the grain is softer than sorghum, so grind it much like barley to preserve the husk.

Adjuncts

Any of the gluten free grains can be used as an adjunct. Just grind it finely if it doesn't have a husk, or less if there is a husk, and add it straight to the mash. You will not need to gelatinise the grain first as the brewing process has a modified decoction step. In this step, we will boil all the grain bill, thus releasing all the starch, no matter what the gelatinisation temperature of the individual grains are.

Sugars

Most sugars are fine to use in gluten free brewing. The exception is dextrose. Commercial dextrose is made by artificially breaking apart the starch molecules of the local grains. You should check locally how the dextrose is made, and from what grain. In Australia it is made from wheat starch, so it can't be used as coeliacs will react to it. Dried corn syrup (maltodextrin) should be fine, the ones I have seen are OK as they are made from corn.

Hops

All hops and hop pellets can be used.

Yeasts

The liquid yeasts are a problem as they are grown on barley based worts, and contain barley based worts in the packaging (thus contain gluten). It should be possible to clean the yeast by taking a few cells and regrowing them in a gluten free sterile wort, or on agar plates with gluten free nutrients.

Dried yeast may have similar problems, but I can't comment on these in general. The DCL dried yeasts (Safale, Saflager & Safbrew) are all gluten free, and I have personally used these yeasts with no problems.

Brewing

There are a number of brewing problems we have to overcome. Sorghum has a high protein level, the malt is not well modified, gluten free malts have low diastatic strength, and the starch generally has high gelatinisation temperatures. The other problem is that the amylase enzymes are very heat sensitive in these grains.

Hence in brewing gluten free beer we include rests at 40°C and 50°C to aid in grain liquefaction and protein breakdown. We also have the saccharification at 63-65°C, as higher temperatures will destroy the ß-amylase too quickly. Before the saccharification rest we need to do a modified single decoction called the "Schmitz Process" (see below) to gelatinise all the starches in the mash. Before we transfer the wort for sparging, we need to add rice hulls (15% of the weigh of the grains) so that a filter bed will be formed as sorghum has no husk.

The

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