Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Gluten Free California Common

So today I am brewing a California Common with a twist, it's gluten free. There are not nearly enough gluten free beers out there and there of plenty of people with celiacs so why not try one?

To start off the recipe is as follows:
5 pounds sorghum syrup
1 pound malted buckwheat
.5 pound honey
.5 oz northern brewer hops @10.5 AA (60 min)
.75 oz northern brewer hops @10.5 AA (15 min)
.75 oz northern brewer hops @ 10.5 AA (1 min)
Yeast is white labs San Fran lager yeast (wlp810)

To make sure the yeast gets a good start I'm using two tubes.

I started a few days ago by soaking the buckwheat in water for 24 hours and rinsing every 8 hours. Once the buckwheat had soaked up a bunch of water I let them sit in a cool dark area of the house with just a splash of water on them. I continued to rinse every 8 hours until the buckwheat sprouted. This took about three days. This morning I rinsed an drained the buckwheat again and place on a cookie sheet in the oven at 170 f for about 2 1/2 hours. The buckwheat was mostly dry at this point so I turned up the heat to 200 for 1 hour to begin malting. Then I turned the stove up to 270 to malt for 90 mins.

This is how they came out:




From here it's on to the brewing. I put 6.5 gallons of water in my keg turned into a brew kettle (keggle) and brought the temp up to 150. It's a partial mash brew so I steeped the buckwheat for 30 min and then remved them and brought the wort to a boil. When it was near a boil I added roughly 5 pounds of the sorghum syrup and the first hop addition.



At the 15 min mark I added the next round of hops and put the chiller in to steralize. I added the honey with ten minutes to go and added the last hop addition before flame out.
The chiller worked really well today since it's pretty cold outside. I still want to get a new chiller soon though. I pitched the yeast at 70 f and made sure to oxygenate the wort. Here is the final product:



Next week I'll move it to the secondary and then in two weeks it will be ready to carbonate and of course drink!

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Ready or Not

Final exam tomorrow for Managerial Accounting. Who schedules a final on a Friday? That's just mean. All in all I have really enjoyed this class this semester though, even if it was only five weeks long. I think Brian is a great professor that really enjoys what he does and it shows in his enthusiasm in class every week. We'll see if I get to take his 2nd class over the summer.