Gluten Free Oatmeal Stout

I will be following this one with interest. My wife cannot have gluten but she really enjoys beer, and she feels bad about not being able to enjoy this hobby with me. Fortunately we have found a brand of hard cider that isn't AB/MC and doesn't suck, but still...

So I am about to being homebrewing as well. I will be using kits for a while before moving to all grain and eventually I'd like to start coming up with my own recipes, primarily because I'm determined to brew good gluten free beer. I know it can be done, it has to be possible!

That said, I know you can get gluten free malts like sorghum for home-brewing, so I would consider doing an oatmeal stout with sorghum filling out the rest of your bill. I would consult the more prolific homebrewers here in the forum before beginning.

Good luck and stay in touch! I want to learn from this.

 

It seems like the enzymatic (Clarity Ferm) route is the best option for people who want to produce gluten-free beers.

If you still want to do a 100% oat malt beer (Ryan did a few years ago). Oat malt has plenty of husk material, unlike flaked oats, so lautering may not be a big issue. Starting with a beta glucan rest might not be a bad idea though. If you want it to taste like a beer rather than a fruit wine, I'd up the amount of grain.

 

This, so much. I've made two batches of beer for a friend using (double doses) of Clarity Ferm, and each time they have tested at around or below 5ppm gluten. The beers are made with barley, hops and yeast, and they look, taste, and smell like real beer. Absolutely blows the sorghum stuff out of the water, and it's not like I'm some amazing brewer. I'm honestly astonished that this stuff isn't being used by more breweries to turn regular beer into gluten-free beer. I guess there must be some labeling issues or something?

 

Interesting! How does it work? How can you test the gluten levels?

Also, did you double dose to make it twice as effective? Or was it like a 10 gallon batch of beer?

 

You can label beers made with the enzyme as "guten reduced" but not "gluten-free."

 

Is this something you think a first-timer could do easily?

 

also if you go the oat beer route...don't forget about golden naked oats which are a crystal malt made from oats...

 

1. It's extremely easy, you just toss the vial of Clarity Ferm in when you pitch your yeast.
2. It works by cleaving the gluten proteins, turning them into other proteins that don't cause allergic reactions in Celiacs. I think.
3. My friend bought a very expensive testing kit that uses monoclonal antibodies to verify the presence of gluten. The test can be calibrated to low or high sensitivity, the latter of which has a threshold of 5ppm (that's what we used both times). The first batch didn't show any gluten at the 5ppm level whatsoever. The second batch also tested clean, but after a while the test started to show some faint color, which says to me that it was probably right around the 5ppm cutoff. You're only supposed to leave the sample for 10 minutes, and we didn't see anything until at least 15 minutes had passed, so draw your own conclusions.
4. A single vial is for 5 gallons of beer, but for my first batch I made 2.5 gallons, so the dose was effectively doubled. The second batch I made was a full 5 gallons, so I bought two vials. This was based on some research that I found on the web that indicated that upping the concentration of Clarity Ferm would, to some degree, further reduce the remaining gluten in the beer. It might be overkill, but my friend is very sensitive and I didn't want to take any chances. And when it costs $25 per batch to test the gluten levels, an extra $4 for a second vial is a pretty cheap insurance policy!

Again, I'm not a very experienced brewer and I don't claim that I make extraordinary beer. My first batch was a Stone IPA clone that turned out fairly well, not world-class but quite tasty. My second batch was a Best Bitter that I think could have been better, but it has gotten good reviews from the people who have tasted it. It's kind of like Boddington's, but with CO2 instead of nitro. Both of those batches could have been better, but they still blow every sorghum beer I've ever tried out of the water.

Huh, guess it's an FDA thing? Still, if you advertised the actual ppm on the bottles, I'd think Celiac beer-lovers would probably come running anyway. Still seems like there's a niche waiting to be exploited by an enterprising brewer...

 

I can't tell you how much I appreciate the info - as soon as I saw your comments last week I looked the stuff up and ordered 2 vials. My wife is VERY excited, and so am I

 

That's how Omission (for example) makes their beers gluten free: http://omissionbeer.com/files/2014/01/Gluten-free-beer-article-S-Van-Zandycke.pdf