cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/677846
My wife and I both have problems with gluten so we’ve been brewing our own GF beer for the last ~7 years. It was difficult to get started but the output is well worth the effort!
Most of them are darker brews (stouts, tripels, etc). This is one of our lighter holiday ales that came in ~8% ABV.
It would be interesting to know the process and ingredients you used. Since you‘re presumably only brewing gluten-free, I guess you also don‘t have to worry about cross-contamination?
I once looked into going the gluten-reduced route (where enzymes destroy the gluten proteins below the detectable threshold) as an option to brew beer for a cousin‘s celiac boyfriend, but getting beer lab-tested for gluten content is just too expensive on a homebrew scale.
The process doesn’t change from regular brewing. It’s strictly an ingredient change and a clean work area to prevent cross-contamination. Any malt made from grains besides barley, wheat, or rye is safe. The default is sorghum malt, and what we use for the majority of our sugar load. In a similar manner to baking/cooking gluten free you end up using a lot of other ingredients to replace one or two main gluten-containing ingredients. I’m on the road for vacation right now but can post some recipes when I get home.
We also looked at post-processing for removal of gluten in regular brews, but since I don’t work in a compatible lab anymore it I don’t have reliable testing available.
Hows the selection on these malts?
As expected, it’s pretty limited. I mainly use Briess Sorghum Extract Syrup as a base and add ingredients from there. As brew bases go it’s pretty mild, so it takes a bit of supplemental grain steeps to add color.
An extended proteinase rest would have been my first thought as well, but I guess the risk is that not enough proteins get munched by the enzymes, especially if you miss some clumps in your mash while mashing in.
What I meant was ClarityFerm/Brewers Clarex, it’s an enzyme preparation used on the cold side. It was originally designed to remove haze and produce clearer beers, but was found to also reduce gluten content to below detectable thresholds. It’s what commercial breweries often use. In some countries, beer produced that way can only be advertised as “gluten-reduced”, not “gluten-free”, though. In terms of ease of application, it seems to be the way to go if you don’t have easy access to malt of gluten-free grains. But alas, since I’m not a celiac myself, and testing is too expensive, I won’t put the burden on an actual celiac how well this works in my setup.
Exactly. My engineering background forces me to keep a tight control on processing and it pains me to not have cheap access to testing. Unless that changes I’ll continue with a fully gluten-free process chain.
Heh, TIL! Thanks for that!