Bleeding Gums Murphy Belge, Take 3 Gluten Free!

I was on a wee quest to brew a new gluten free beer this MLK Jr. Day and looked around at a few recipes and decided that I had not gotten Bleeding Gums wired yet.

Bleeding Gums is a sorghum based Belgian wheat beer (Belgian White) with no barley, hops or yeast with any gluten at all.  I first researched sorghum based beers last year and their issues with flavor and tried to come up with something that not only works with the sorghum flavors, instead of trying to cover it up, but teases it into play with citrus.  I got lucky.  At first it was very brash.  Sooo many different flavors when it was young just collided into a batch of what tasted like lemon dish soap.  As it aged it got mellow.  My second batch was similar, but less strong.  This third batch I hope I get wired as I tweaked the yeast and used the freshest ingredients that I could. 

Last night I roasted millet.  I doubled the amount of millet for this batch.  Millet give an appearance and flavor wheat.  It's quite similar and smells awesome.  I only lightly browned it.  I could have had more, but I don't want to over do it.  I'm curious to what the beer looks like.  Right now it's green.

Once the millet was roasted I let it cool and this morning I blended it to break the husks.  A grain mill is needed by my operation at this stage if I am to continue this kind of stuff.  Blender grinds it too fine, but it's ok with this beer, it needs to be slightly cloudy.  So I ground it up and put it in a bag and steeped it at 165 degrees for 30 minutes.  My grain bag was tied too tight and the mesh too fine.  I dumped it into a bigger grain bag with course mesh with the help of Joan Countryman who came by to help out.  Thanks Joanie!  How are those finger burns?  LOL

I wound up steeping for 90 minutes total before I got the boil going.  Now I was doing a ten gallon batch and brewing with 6 gallons in the keggle.  So all my ingredients are doubled and the millet quadrupled!

While steeping was taking place, I cleaned my fermenters and added one pack of fermentis belgian ale yeast T-58 to them and added 1/2 gallon bottled water to each to hydrate the dry yeast.  At this time I also heated a quart of water on the stove and added my maltodextrin, lactose, molasses, sugar, and honey to get them nice and dissolved.  Maltodextrin  clumps and needs to dissolve.  This mix of fermentable and non fermentable sugars are going to give the beer body because most sorghum beers lack that.

So the boil approaches and I add 6.6 lbs sorghum extract.  The boil starts and this is what I do:

60 min.      Add 6.6 lbs Sorghum
                  1 oz Styrian hops

45 min.      1 oz. Styrian hops

15 min.      16 oz. Lactose
                   12 oz. Maltodextrin
                   2 oz.  bitter orange peel
                   2 oz. Coriander
                   8 oz. fresh and very hot ginger
                   16 oz. baking molasses
                   16 oz. Orange blossum honey
                   20 oz.  Orange blossum, sage, and clover honey
                   1 oz Hallertau hops

5 min.         1 oz. Hallertau hops

Added 5 gallons bottled water and placed in fermenters.  Initial gravity 1.012

Fermentation tomorrow morning is going to be off the CHAIN!