The Return of Barely Brewers!

So I kind of let the blog go for a while... I've been traveling in Asia for the last 2 months and am excited to be back and brewing! I was traveling with a good friend of mine, Caitlin, who was teaching in Thailand for the last year. She also happens to be gluten intolerant. While Asia is great in terms of gluten-free (GF) food options, it's not really possible to get a GF beer over there. I pledged to try to brew a GF beer for her when we returned and after a couple weeks of jet lag, I got right on it! A few friends, including Caitlin, were interested in participating in the brew so we all got together for a fun-filled evening of brewing.

I'd done some research on GF brewing and the base is nearly always malted sorghum or malted sorghum extract. I decided to use the extract, having malted sorghum replace malted barley extract as the main source of fermentable sugars. In addition, some molasses and raw turbinado sugar will provide the rest of the fermentables. 

I also bought some roasted buckwheat, kasha, and roasted it further to darken it and bring out some more caramel-y flavors and colors. While the buckwheat will provide very few fermentable sugars, I'm hoping that the nutty flavors I read are associated with brewing with unmalted buckwheat come through a bit.

After giving Caitlin some options on styles and components of the beer, she settled on a pumpkin spice ale. So I we used the flesh of 5 sugar pumpkins, roasted to bring out the flavors and sugars, as well as the usual suspects of pumpkin pie spices: cinnamon, all-spice, nutmeg, ginger, and cloves.

I grated whole nutmeg

The pumpkin was integrated into two different stages of the brew: the mini-mash and the boil. It was mashed slightly for the mash, allowing more surface are in contact with the wort. The hop schedule was very simple, only Northern Brewer.

Adding the pumpkin to the boil

The whole process was incredibly smooth with so many hands on the brew pot it was really fun to brew with friends, teaching them a little bit as we went. The only thing that went wrong I didn't realize until much later: I'd forgotten to add the whirlfloc tablet, a clarifying agent made from refined Irish moss, a red-algae sea weed. So the beer may be a bit cloudier than our usual output but hopefully with a good long rest in the secondary fermenter it will clear up on its own.

My buddy Jack pouring the wort

The beer is bubbling along now though the process is certainly playing out differently than with gluten-full beers. For one, there is no krausen, the foamy yeasty layer formed at the top of the beer during rapid fermentation. It does indeed smell like delicious beer and I'm excited to see how it winds up!

Sam aerating the beer