Gluten free beer, on it's own, has not been very difficult. Surprising to find out. Consiting of sorghum syrup, hops, water and yeast and a total of two months worth of time. Most beers that are created this way are easily two types. An IPA or a pilsner and I'm working on finding how I like mine in these ways. Most people are limited in their Gluten Free beer choices. New Grist, Redbridge, Woodchucks and Strongbow (The latter two of course are ciders, but can usually be found where the other two may not be.) I also have the Jolly Pumpkin Bellipago near here. As I've mentioned before, I have had about 10 gallons, in single gallon sized batches that I have been working on. The most recent of which is on it's second week.
I've been reading about some gluten free stouts. Two or three people have made some successful chocolate stouts, and I wanted to see about doing something similar. I've never been much of a lighter bodied hoppy beer fan (IPA, pilsner etc) but really like reds and stouts. Both of these get much of their color from toasted grains (barley) which will often give it a toast and caramel taste, and sometimes a bit of body. Doing this as a gluten free beer using extract is harder. Because I don't quite know how toasted grains act in a beer, other than from some minor articles, I decided to practice roasting some and seeing what it does to a beer. What's generally accepted is that it will give the beer a nutty flavor and probably some excess haze rather than anything else. In order to get other good things from it, it would require a process known as malting. Something I'll be trying to figure out.
What I had practiced with was oats. Plain, whole oats that were not malted, not cooked, not rolled. Pretty much whole seeds. I toasted these in a popcorn popper for 4-6 minutes until they gave a toasted flavor and stuck it into a bag for about two weeks to release the volitile scents (getting rid of the charred burnt smell, but keeping the toasty smell)
On November 17th I used this recipe:
1 gallon water (60 min)
.25 oz Columbus Hops (60 min) for a mild bitterness
1.47lbs Sorghum Syrup (60 min)
2 oz toasted whole oats (15min) - I have no idea what it'll do
irish moss (15 min) - for some clarity
English Ale yeast that I had been waking up using some old English Ale yeast from a month or two ago in some water that had been boiled and some brown rice syrup so that the yeast would feed and grow for a few days.
This means that for one full hour, I boiled the water, the hops and the syrup together. Fourty-five minutes into the boil, I added the oats and the moss. Once the hour was up, I then chilled the pot in the sink with cold water, then filtered the liquid into a jug and added the yeast. I did take the measurement and found it to be around 1.060 gravity which tells how much sugar it has in it.
On November 29th I racked the beer, meaning I transferred the slightly alcoholic liquid into another jug, leaving the sludge behind. There was quite a bit of sludge, probably from the oats rather than the yeast. I tossed the yeast, forgetting that I had wanted to try a process known as yeast washing which would clean off the yeast and let me have the yeast which is even more gluten free than before. (I'll try it next time).
Into this secondary fermenter, I added:
2 oz Chocolate nibs soaked in vodka to sterilize
Cold Brewed Coffee (Planned on .5-1 ounce)
Oops, I used a full 8 ounces of cold brewed coffee. A Burundi Kayanza Bwayi roasted on Tuesday the 23rd (So that I could bring some home for the holiday weekend). I cold brewed the coffee in a french press then decanted it into a bottle and chilled it to let the sediment settle. It's a mild tasting coffee when cold, and Sweet Maria's recommends it at a City to City+ roast describing it as a "True Bourbon character. Sweet and balanced cup with creamy body, mild citrus, raisin, plum, honey, refined sweetness. Delicate and great as a single origin espresso.
It's not a strong coffee, even when brewed hot. It's delicate, slightly sweet, mild, not overpowering and just good all around from what my family agreed on. It kept this sweetness even as a cold brew, which I had tasted during the first decanting.
I'll let it sit there for about a week, then bottle it and let it stand for at least one month before testing it to find out what flavors come out. Maybe I'll also do a pretest by putting some into a 20 ounce soda bottle and pressurizing it with CO2 for an immediate test.
I've been a little busy with the holiday season and some back issues so I haven't been doing much gluten free searching. I did have a gluten free holiday this past weekend. It was pretty standard. Turkey, ham, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberry relish. What was gluten free of course was the dressing and the gravy. The dressing this time around was purchased pre-made from a local store, but we've made it before using gluten free bread/croutons. The gravy was made using a gluten free flour, mostly rice flour with some potato starch and tapioca starch, that was browned in oil before adding chicken stock and seasoning.
I also brought the pound cake using the Land O'Lakes recipe from before. It wasn't baking well and was quite watery after the hour was up so I left it for another 10 minutes. Of course this meant that the crust burned somehow, which I had to cut off before serving. I'm still eating the gluten free poundcake crusts, which aren't that bad. They're not a hard burnt, just a bit more caramelized than your ordinary piece of pound cake.
We'll see if I can do more baking soon.
Over the weekend, I was browsing around the farmer's market. It's always an entertaining thing to do especially if it's a nice day outside. The farmer's market provides a chance to meet and speak with the providers, and see what's in season. Most farmers markets involve the local farmers and producers, usually within a certain radius, but may include small farmers from surrounding states as further defined by an acceptable radius. Some larger markets can involve dealers and resellers or farmers from a more distant areas, they just don't call themselves local.
While looking through the stalls, I finally found the stall that had gluten free baked goods. It was mid to late in the day for a farmer's market (1pm) and the market was slowing but there were still a few cookies left to buy. I bought one of the two remaining packs and spoke with the baker. It was interesting to find that along with the more common gluten free ingredients (rice flour, tapioca flour, potato starch) but also used coconut flour. I've seen, and even purchased coconut flour (from Bob's Red Mill) intending to use it for my own baked goods but I just couldn't decide on an application. She had said that it creates a softer, chewier cookie since all of us bakers who have used the standard mix of rice flour, tapioca starch and potato starch have tasted how grainy the cookies turn out to be due to the physical structure of pulverized rice and lack of liquid to soften it.
The cookies were delicious, so unfortunately I didn't take any pictures of them, and the person getting the other cookies said how the brownies are even better and we talked about those. I'll be certain to try those next time, but in the meantime it turns out that she got the chocolate she used in them from a local chocolate maker.
I wandered further and found the Mindo chocolate makers. What's interesting about them being local is that they purchase from a source in Ecuador and ferment their beans in Ecuador where they had purchased land after living in the US for many years. On their land, they have a resturant where they may process and sell chocolate in Equador, but the fermented beans also are shipped up to Michigan where they process (roast, ground, conched etc) all the way to finished chocolate. This also means that they sell the fermented whole beans, the roasted nibs (the inside part of the bean), chocolate liquor (the pure chocolate in liquid form after the beans have been roasted and ground, doesn't contain alcohol), and of course chocolate. This refers to unsweetened chocolate at 100%, dark chocolate at about 77% and 66%. It also refers to some chocolates that contain nuts, fruits and other ingredients. I didn't think to ask if they sold the cocoa butter.
I picked up some cocoa nibs as one of the ingredients for a gluten free stout that I'll be making soon. Only a few ingredients left to figure out.
Here's the reason why I haven't been writing about, or creating any gluten free beers lately:
The plastic jugs are ciders where I added some champagne yeast and have been letting ferment as well as the mead that I described creating last post.
Soon, I will get to the point of detailing out my measurements and dates so I can reference them better.
As for my prior beers, I had some people test out #3, 4, 5 and 6. My earlier batches. It seems that #3 was the most well received so I'll have to see if I noted down anything about the recipe to find out what it was. Ah, poor note taking procedures, how did I ever get through school?
Mead is an ages old fermented drink created from honey and water and is similar to a wine. Back in the day, it's likely that wild yeasts were used. Even today, this is sometimes done. In fact, I spoke with someone who had simply mixed water and honey into a jug and let it sit without even closing or capping the jug. They had made two batches and one was said to turn out quite decently, however the other one didn't come out quite so well, a bit musty and off tasting.
One of the main problems with wild yeasts is their unpredictibility. These wild yeasts can be different from place to place. For instance a San Francisco sourdough bread takes the wild yeasts in the San Francisco region, however the same sourdough starter from Michigan will be vastly different. Perhaps wheat bread isn't the best comparison to use on a gluten free blog, but it still remains that the yeast that takes hold is different. Even seasons may cause differences in the yeasts. Lindeman's Lambics from Belgium states that the wild yeast they use is only available certain times a year in a certain region of Brussels. Also, in the case of honey, the honey itself can have a variety of dormant yeasts. For this reason, many who have not yet taken the time to test and retest their wild yeasts will use an isolated strain of yeast that has been grown and is sold in packets or vials.
Breadmakers, yes, even us gluten free ones, will make bread using a dry yeast that creates leavening by ways of carbon dioxide when it consumes the sugars and starches of the initial mix. This also creates a particular flavor from the yeast itself. The same thing happens with beer and wine. There are many varieties of both beer yeasts and wine yeasts, each having their own differences in the way they taste, and how the resulting liquid tastes.
The starting sweet material (in this case honey) also makes a difference in the finished product. Honey is a sweet fluid that originates from the nectar of flowers that undergoes a natural process by a fairly common insect known as the bee. Honey has different flavors depending on the source. Honey from clover flowers has a light sweet flavor and texture, while honey from buckwheat flowers is dark and molasseslike with a heavy malty taste. There are as many different types of honeys as there are flowers, though there are usually certain commonly known varieties such as Clover, Orange blossom, Buckwheat. There are plenty more. Nonspecific commercial honeys are usually blended and pasturized to a fairly neutral flavor profile.
Water. Yes, even the simple H2O combination is different from place to place. Mineral and chemical content, Ph balance, the list can go on and on.
There's so much that can be discussed in regards to all of this that I couldn't begin to cover it. One of the most well known resources is Ken Schramm's The Compleat Meadmaker.
Now, after all this information you'd think I'd do something amazing right? Well, to be honest I used some pretty simple things to try creating a single gallon of mead.
* 1 gallon of tap water
* 1 packet of champagne yeast. I used a Lavin EC-1118 costing me .79 cents and I didn't even use the full packet. (Note that a single tiny packet is used for 5 gallon batches and I only was making one gallon)
* Possibly optional: some yeast nutrients and yeast energizer. Honey doesn't have the nitrogen requirements for yeast, but some meads are made without these. What may happen without the nitrogen is just an incomplete ferment, meaning that some honey and sweetness may be left over or possibly some sulfur smells from the yeast.
* A sterilized funnel
* A sterilized cider (or water) jug. (I don't suggest a milk jug, they're impossible to clean the milk smell out of.)
* A rubber stopper and airlock costing me $3, but many other things can be used. One example would be foil or plastic wrap with a tiny hole poked in, secured by a rubber band.
(I sterilized everything with a mix of water and bleach, as described on the bleach bottle, giving it a good rinse after. Bleach clings so it needs a good rinse which does mean that it can be reinfected by contact, where some other sanitizers just needs to be poured out and not rinsed.)
For about a year now, I've been making my own Kefir. About once or twice a week, I refresh the milk in my kefir. Kefir is a form of yogurt, where beneficial bacteria eat away at the milk sugars creating either a slightly tangy (to some people, just sour) creamy product that is often slightly fizzy from natural carbonation. There's a lot of detail about kefir that I won't get into since I haven't done my research on it, instead, I'm going to go over what I do each week for more kefir.
Kefir starts with clumps of bacteria and yeast, usually Lactobacillus along with other strains. These clumps are called grains and look like tiny brains. If you're lucky, you can locate someone in your area via different sources, to find where you can get some free kefir grains since people who make kefir often keep getting more and more(more on how they reproduce later). It doesn't take very many grains to create kefir.
I toss these grains into a jar, about a quart or half gallon jar is enough for me, one person, and I add milk until it's just about full with just enough of an airspace. I then leave that jar out overnight, (that's right, no heating). The kefir grains go into action, eating the lactose (milk sugars) and reproducing. I tend to use a 1% milk, however it's possible to use whole or even cream to create the kefir. A higher fat milk creates a creamier product, but I like the liquidness of the 1%.
Often, people will use a lowfat milk and warm it with milk powder to create a higher protein liquid which they then create either kefir or other yogurts with. Some people will even use raw, unpasturized milk to create kefir. I've also seen other forms using goat milk and what seems to be coconut milk. I'm not quite sure how that works, however there are apparently forms of kefir that work with just juice too.
I have heard that the forms of kefir that work with juice (known as water kefir) may be a different strain of bacteria that's still beneficial, but instead of lactose, they eat the sugars (fructose, glucose and probably dextrose) leaving a slightly fermented juice that again, can be slightly fizzy.
The carbonation comes from the creation of carbon dioxide from the bacteria in the kefir which fills the airspace and eventually equalizes into the liquid so that there's equal carbonation in both. I've done this longer than beer, but I suppose it's the same process.
After a day, maybe even two if I forget, I strain the liquid into another jar, leaving the grains behind. I stick this jar into the fridge and pour fresh milk into the container with the grains. If I wanted to, I could again leave the grain jar out to create more kefir, but because one a week is enough for me, I'll stick both bottles into the fridge. Once cold, I'll drink my kefir either plain, with honey, or with chocolate syrup. I'll even use it in place of yogurt or milk (or even in addition to yogurt) when making a smoothie.
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| Extreme closeup of grains and a few curds |
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| Kefir! |