Gluten Free - No Malt Experiment #3

[Thirsty Boy]

Number three in my series of experiments to brew AG (sort of) Gluten free beer but avoid the pain of having malt my own gluten free grain.

I wont go much into the reasons behind doing this - they are explained in my topics Gluten Free - No Malt experiment & Gluten Free - No Malt experiment #2. Suffice it to say I am learning a lot and having fun.

The beer is mid boil as I type - so obviously it worked at least partially. Here's the rationale.

A beer whose grist is predominantly unmalted de-husked millet grains and some biscuits I made from millet flour (baked brown to increase colour and flavour)
Conversion of enzymes would be done using amylases derived from rice wine.

Originally I was going to start from scratch using Koji Kin and sake making techniques to get me some enzymes (thanks MHB for the idea) - but that seemed like as much work as malting GF grains in the first place, so why bother? If I could find ready made Koji Kome it would be different - just dump it in and go... but I couldn't find any.

BUT - I did find this


Com Ruou (sweet rice wine) - rice floating in a sweet and mildly boozy liquid. Made in way very related to how you would make sake or any of the other versions of rice wine. Unlike Kome Koji or Amakaze (pre-cursors to sake making) the Com Ruou already has yeast in it and is partially fermented. But that's OK - I was going to mash this at beer brewing temperatures - the yeast would cease to be a player very quickly. I bought 2 tubs of Com Ruou ($2.80 each) and a 500g packet of de-husked millet grains ($2.50)


And went home to plan

Recipe - 5L @ 70% efficiency (thats what it turned out to be anyway) OG 1.047 and 15.5EBC

500g millet (1.036ppg)
250g baked millet biscuits (1.036ppg)
2 tubs of Com Ruou (assumed 200g of actual dry rice at 1.040ppg)
100g of light amber candi sugar (home made)

8g 3.7% AA Saaz for 20IBU

Wyeast 1272 (Am ale II)

Mash for extreme niceness to enzymes. A little research about Aspergillus Oryzae showed me that the major enzymes involved would be alpha amylase and amyloglucosidase. I couldn't work out how heat liable the AMG was going to be, so I decided to play it safe. Long, low and slow mash ramping all the way through from 45 to 78. with extended rests at 60, 65, 68, 74. The alpha am was going to survive all of that and peak out at the end... I figured I would catch the AMG somewhere along the way. I am mildly concerned that the carboxypeptidases will destroy any head potential... but we will see.


Millet and millet biscuits were placed in a rice cooker with water at 3:1 Liquor to grist and cooked. The biscuits probably didn't need it but went in anyway.


After it had all cooked and hydrated properly - it was mixed with further water from the tap for a total volume of around 6L (ie pot 3/4 full) and hi with the bamix in lieu of having crushed the grains. Once it was well whizzed and down to 45 - the two tubs of Com Ruou were added and were once again whizzed in with the bamix.

The pot had a temp probe inserted, its lid put on and was placed in a very slow oven. Stirring every 20-30minutes it was raised to 60 over about 60mins - the mash was rested at 60 for 2 hrs and then raised to 65 over another 30mins - rested for another hour - raised to 68 on the stovetop and rested for 30mins - raised to 74 on the stovetop and rested for 30mins - a mashout addition of boiling water raised the temp to about 80 and the volume to just less than 8L. Total mashing time of just about 6hrs.

A couple of good handsfull of rice hulls were stirred into the mash and it was transferred to a calico filter bag to drain - experience from experiments 1 & 2 told me that it will drain very slowly and the grains will retain 3-4L of water per KG. So the bag is hung up to drain and I went to bed. Next morning I have collected 3.5L of really very clear wort. 3.5L more boiling water was added to the mash, stirred in and allowed to drain while I went to work.

By the time I got home, the draining and a moderate amount of bag squeezing yielded 7.25L of 7.2brix (1.027) wort. Which means a pre-boil efficiency of 70% (assuming my assumptions about the potential of the grains are right) It smells a little like sake or rice wine.. but I suppose that is to be expected really. I boiled down to my anticipated starting volume for a 60min boil, added the hops and there are about 30mins left in the boil. It has largely stopped smelling like sake, smells kinda malty and hoppy and far more normal than it is different.

I'm just about to go make the candy sugar....

TB

 

[Millet Man]

Looking forward to seeing how this one turns out TB, more than one way to skin a cat (or kitten.......).

Cheers, Andrew.

 

[troopa]

Love reading your trials and tribulations of this experiment for no other reason that its different
I very much doubt ill ever make this beer ever in my life but...
Keep it coming

Tom

 

[Thirsty Boy]

glad its not just me that finds it interesting, if mostly impractical.

Candy sugar got made - reasonable medium amber. Went in and the whole wort ended up with 5L post boil at 1.047. Wort tastes normal, although a little tannic. Could be just hops... but I think I might have pulled a little astringency out of the grains - something I didn't think was a real risk considering the lack of husks. Might have been the rice hulls, might have been something else, might not be a real issue at all.

No-chilling at the moment

 

[raven19]

Another fascinatingly good thread TB.

Keep us posted mate on how things progress.

Just rereading the OP, I read that you made the biscuits with the smae ingredients then cooked them for different periods, hence the variety in colours on the biscuits - all prior to adding to the mash?


'6 hour Mash time' - fark that is looong!

Trusting/hoping no baddies got into the wort whilst the long drain time occurred. The boil would kill them all anyway though.

 

[Thirsty Boy]

Just rereading the OP, I read that you made the biscuits with the smae ingredients then cooked them for different periods, hence the variety in colours on the biscuits - all prior to adding to the mash?

Trusting/hoping no baddies got into the wort whilst the long drain time occurred. The boil would kill them all anyway though.

Thanks

Yep - biscuits were all just millet flour and a very small amount of sugar (like 1%) to promote Maillard reactions. Water to a reasonably stiff dough. roll out and cut cookies. All baked till mostly dry, then because my oven bites .. put under the griller till they browned to various stages.

In a better oven you would probably just bake till brown - or flip them over under the griller to get twice as much colour formation per biscuit.

Baddies dealt with by boil - in warmer weather or if I was making the batch for "quality" rather than proof of concept, I'd probably do it inside inside a sanitised container or in the fridge to keep any microbe activity between lauter and boil down. If I was willing to have cloudy wort.. I could have squeezed the bag out and speeded things up.

Its going to get a different yeast than the planned American Ale II - Wyeast 2124 Bohemian Lager .. I need to grow a starter for a lager anyway, so I will divert 0.25 of my smack pack to this thing and just do a two step starter for the lager.

 

[Thirsty Boy]

I just had my first glass of this stuff - and bugger me if it didn't work very well indeed.

It took almost 25days for the fermentation to completely die off, this was Wyeast 2124 fermented at cool ambient - then I cc'd for ages trying to get it to clear... wouldn't. So I racked to a new demijohn onto some gelatin and a tspn of pvpp... bingo. A week later it had cleared up nicely. Force carbed in a party keg. All in all 53 days. But I could have saved a bunch of that by going with the racking, gelatin routine as soon as primary fermentation stopped. Or in a full size batch, I'd just filter it.

In the end I worked out that I pretty drastically underpitched this beer - perhaps things might have gone faster with a proper pitching rate.

OG was 1.044 - FG 1.009
Colour - 10ish EBC
Bitterness - on target at what I would say was about 20IBU

Smell/Taste -- a little fruity, dry, very faintly tart but not in any way sour, lightly malty - but considering it has no actual malt, more than you would expect; and... well - it tastes a fair bit like a Carlton beer. Somewhere between a pure blonde and a Carlton Draught. But a bit less "Carlton" if you know what I mean. Its actually pretty good if you aren't madly opposed to the CUB flavour profile. Your average punter would immediately identify it as being Beery in smell and taste.

To be honest.. I would have no idea that this wasn't a malted barley beer. It has something a little different about it... but not something that would leap out at you and shout "gluten free", or made from "Millet and Glutenous Rice wine" - I would just think it was another Aussie style lager from one of the mainstream breweries.

I think it got the Carlton profile from the 2124 fermented warm - I have heard a few times that that yeast tastes like Carlton Draught if you ferment it significantly above true lager temps - so I am guessing that flavour could be avoided. And the rest of the flavours are normal - and thats what I wanted, normal beer flavours from a beer that has nothing normal about it. I'm pretty damn happy with that.

The next step for me now is to have another go at both this and the exogenous enzymes brew - but try to normalize the mash a bit. Its all fine to do a six hour or a three day mash as an experiment - but I have no desire to do it that way again. I'd like to come up with a reliable not too hard to do recipe and method for producing a medium/small batch of "normal" (by the average punter's reckoning) beer using supermarket GF ingredients. Then I can whip up a batch for my coeliac cousin occasionally - and share the joy with any gluten intolerant AHBers or their family.

I'll have this beer tasted independently by one or two of the brewers at work, my wife and most importantly by my coeliac cousin - will report on their reactions.

TB

 

[Phoney]

How did your first two turn out, taste wise?

My girlfriend has gone off gluten, which doesnt bother me of course But id be keen to make a GF beer one day that we can both enjoy - so long as the taste is up to scratch of a malted barley beer.

 

[Wisey]

TB I like your trials - im never probably going to do it, but its interesting to read

 

[Thirsty Boy]

How did your first two turn out, taste wise?

My girlfriend has gone off gluten, which doesnt bother me of course But id be keen to make a GF beer one day that we can both enjoy - so long as the taste is up to scratch of a malted barley beer.

Not bad depending on your definition - the first one was OK, sort of normal. Drinkable but not what you would call particularly good. The second isn't very nice at all from a normal beer perspective, but it was a hell of a lot nicer than I expected it to be considering how it was made. So both successful in their own way - and all three experiments so far have proved the concept I was testing.

As I mentioned above, the job now is to make the processes more "normal" and to work on getting the flavour right, maybe at the same time, but probably it will be process first and flavour second. I'm leaning towards the rice wine enzymes actually... not only because the test batch is actually pretty decent beer, but because anyone with access to a decent Asian grocer would be able to do it... and the enzymes I am using are less available. Might as well concentrate on the method that could be useful to other people too.

Glad you are enjoying my silly late night brewing adventures Wisey.

Thirsty