Buckwheat Groats versus Malted Buckwheat in gluten free beer

[Bentnose]

After suddenly becoming gluten intolerant this year, I'm looking at getting into gluten free home brewing as buying commercial made is expensive. I have some recipes I'm going to try out but am looking at Buckwheat as one of the grains I will use. I have a recipe that involves just using unmilled Buckwheat Groats (and toasted red lentils) in a bag in your brew kettle while you heat it up to 71 degrees then remove the bag.

I had another recipe that involved toasting the groats then grinding/miling them and steeping them in hot water. Groats aren't malted so just wondering if they will add any fermentables to the beers, I'm guessing not, just flavour; they will use a sorghum syrup base.

As an alternative I can buy Malted Buckwheat, which has no diastatic power, it would either be steeped just for flavour with no fermentables, I'm assuming, or I could add enzymes to mash it.

Anyone have an opinion on using Buckwheat Grouts versus Malted Buckwheat and what they will contribute to the beer in terms of fermentables and flavours?

 

[MHB]

You will I suspect be better off using some of the GF extracts on the market. Briess have a couple, Sorghum and a Rice extract, you can make some pretty decent beer with them, there are even a couple of recipes on the Briess website worth having a play with.

Personally I find Buckwheat has an unpleasant bitter to metallic taste that isn’t what I'm looking for in beer.
Mark

 

[Bentnose]

Thanks for the advice, the Briess recipe looks like a good place to start.

I will try Buckwheat at some point, worthwhile adding it to the same recipe later to see if I like it or not.

 

[MHB]

Good call, personally not all that big a fan of either Buckwheat or Lentils (except maybe in Indian food).
Have tasted some buckwheat beers and wasn’t all that impresses. The great joy of home brewing is that you aren’t brewing for me and there is no rule that says you have to like the same things as me.
Worth noting that the Sorghum beers I have tasted improved dramatically with time, somewhere in the 6 weeks to 3 month range they went from Ho-Hum to pretty decent beer.

Mark

 

[yankinoz]

With one exception I have not liked buckwheat beers. The exception is a 2.5% abv ale from Rogue, in Oregon. Nice toasfy flavot in a beer about 8 srm They used a high proportion of buckwheat malt and fermented with Pacman. That's all I can tell you.

 

[Bentnose]

I'll soon have myself organised to make one of the Briess recipes, a bit more cleaning and stuff to order. Later I'll try some recipes with small amounts of buckwheat both malted and unmalted, sounds like I need to be a little wary.