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’s a good day to be a cider nerd, I get gluten free and low carb right out of the box!
Cool! I’m fine with gluten but curious what you do to make it.
The biggest restriction is in malting. Since gluten is present in wheat, barley, and rye it can be difficult to find a good brew base. We use sorghum malt as our starting point and spice it from there. A lot of times we will also roast something like red quinoa and let it soak in the wort for added color.
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.
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.
