GF Brewing to Style - Millet Wine
GF Brewing to Style #1 - Posted to Zero Tolerance Facebook Group January 9, 2022
The beginning of January has some beer drinkers and homebrewers pulling back on their alcohol intake after the potential excesses of the December holiday season. So why the hell start the year with a style that clocks in around 12% ABV? Because you’re going to set this beer aside for several months before you finally drink it. A batch brewed now may just be your winter holiday beer two or three years out. AND why not start this series with a style name that fully embraces one of our key GF ingredients?
Though you could look for inspiration from Asia (Taiwan, for example, has a tradition of unmalted millet wines made for harvest festivals) we’re sticking with the Anglo-American approach here. English and American barley wines are full-bodied, intensely malty beers at the extreme end of the ABV scale (providing warming but also flavour and aroma). A millet wine deserves the same treatment but of course should boldly embrace the grain’s unique flavour profile.
Related styles and alternatives
Strong Ale, Old Ale. Buckwheat Wine, Oat Wine, Rice Wine, "Ale Wine" or "Malt Wine" to cover the various gluten free cereals available.
(Don’t obsess about) the Numbers:
OG 1.080 - 1.120, FG 1.016 - 1.030, IBUs 35 - 100, SRM 8 - 22, ABV 8 - 12%. (References: BJCP style guide, 17D English Barley Wine, 22C American Barleywine[1])
Key attributes:
Rich, malty, balanced, and warming – not syrupy, cloying, or solvent.
Commercial Examples:
- Evasion Brewing - Grandpa’s Nap (Bronze medal winner at 2019 GABF)
- Evasion Brewing – Dull Boy
- Moonshrimp Brewing - Moon Maker Ale Wine
GF Recipes Links:
Grain bill & fermentables:
You’re going for malty not roasty (save that for the imperial stout). A couple possible approaches include:
- Option 1) a pale millet base with the addition of some character millet malts: Goldfinch, Munich, caramel and/or one of the new (late 2021) roasted Vienna malts (tho sparingly);
- Option 2) a mostly Goldfinch millet base
- Option 3) a mostly amber rice malt base for a rice variation
- Option 4) a combination of biscuit rice and caramel buckwheat malt for a rice/buckwheat variation
Make about 5% of your fermentables simple sugar – preferably table sugar or dextrose. This will help achieve your gravity without compromising on attenuation – you don’t want your final gravity too high.
The high alcohol content is going to be foam-negative, so adding some malted buckwheat or flaked/torrefied quinoa may help a little bit on that front. I’d avoid oats on this one.
Your actual grain bill and batch size may depend on your equipment. A 5 gal / 19L batch is going to need somewhere around 22 lbs (10 kg) of grain – at the upper threshold for some homebrew systems. You can scale down to a 3 gallon (11 L) batch or consider combining multiple mashes (and a longer brew day).
Extract option?:
Until someone comes up with a millet LME/DME solution, the challenge with GF extracts (sorghum or rice syrup) may be achieving the desired maltiness. Jason Yerger (Mutantis Brewing) suggests a combination of sorghum syrup, rice syrup, D45 candi syrup, wildflower or buckwheat honey, and brown or demerara sugar. You could also try caramelizing rice syrup in lieu of candi syrup. With all extract options ensure you use a very high dose of yeast nutrients and pitch a lot of yeast. Stay tuned for some more extract-friendly styles.
Mashing and Enzymes:
As always, access to enzymes often depends on where you live. You want to maximize extract and attenuation in a big beer like this. Assuming you’re going the exogenous route, Ondea Pro and Ceremix Flex (using the higher end of the Ceremix Flex dosage recommendation) would be ideal, but I’m sure you can pull this off with some high-temp stable alpha amylase perhaps in combination with a maltogenic option (e.g. SEBAmyl L, Fungamyl). Another option would be adding some glucoamylase to a portion of the mash at the end, but making sure to denature this with a high temp mash out.
Hops:
Hop bitterness should help balance the maltiness. For a North American approach, shoot for an IBU/OG ratio around .85 or .90 (e.g. 100 IBU and OG 1.117 = 100/117 = .85) – a reasonably high hop backbone, but it shouldn’t drift into DIPA territory. If you suspect your FG is going to be on the high side, being on the high end of the IBU/OG ratio may help with balance. Hop aromas and flavour are going to eventually subside as the beer ages. Choose hops with high alpha acid levels to minimize the amount of vegetal matter in a beer that you want to age for a while. Dry hopping before packaging will give you some additional aroma complexity during aging and may help promote foam in this high alcohol beer.
Yeast:
Look for a clean, alcohol tolerant yeast capable of high attenuation. Some GF options include: Fermentis US-05, Fermentis K-97, Fermentis W-34/70, Lallemand Diamond Lager, Lallemand Nottingham, Mangrove Jack New World Strong Ale, Mangrove Jack Bavarian Lager.
You may want to consider pitching two packs for this one, or a very healthy and active starter, and for sure include yeast nutrients. Oxygenating the cooled wort before pitching would also be key.
Ferment on the cool side of the manufacturer's recommended range – you want to avoid producing some of the “hotter” alcohols that come with warmer fermentation. And keep temperature steady to avoid letting the yeast go into hibernation prematurely.
Aging & Packaging:
You want to give this time to ferment to completion before bottling or kegging – make sure your final gravity readings remain stable for at least a few weeks before considering packaging. Carbonate to 2 volumes. For those bottling, Skleice OG reports adding additional yeast (in his case CBC-1) along with the priming sugar. Whether in bottles or kegs, put it out of your mind for at least 6 months before sampling. Millet Wine is a great candidate for barrel aging – which you can simulate without the actual barrel by adding oak to the fermenter or keg (chips, cubes or spirals will give varying degrees of oak character … sterilize and optionally soak in a distilled liquor of your choice). This should be good to cellar for at least a couple of years.
ZT FB Threads:
Gluten free brewing resources:
Conventional resources:
- Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine - Make Your Best American Barleywine
- Brewing Classic Styles (Zainasheff & Palmer): English & American Style Barleywine
- Imbibe Magazine - Wheat Wine Ales
References
- ↑ [2021 BJCP style guide https://www.bjcp.org/bjcp-style-guidelines/]