Beer #1: Brown Ale

Luckily for me, I'm not starting from scratch - folks all around the world have worked on making gluten-free homebrew. Some of the best resources are available at HomebrewTalk's Gluten Free Brewing discussion forum. I selected a recipe for a Gluten Free American Brown Ale as my first attempt, with some slight modifications that I thought would work well. The recipe I used:

6 lbs. sorghum syrup (15 minutes)
1 lb toasted buckwheat (steeped at 170 degrees F for 20 minutes)
1 lb toasted millet (steeped at 170 degrees F for 20 minutes)
1 oz Fuggles hops (60 minutes)
1 oz Challenger hops (60 minutes)
0.75 oz Kent Goldings hops (15 minutes)
1 tsp Irish moss (15 minutes)
1.5 lbs oz dark Belgian candi sugar (15 minutes)
Safale S-04 English Ale Yeast

This recipe was for 5 gallons but I was only making a 2 gallon batch, so I reduced the proportions accordingly.

I was able to buy the buckwheat toasted but had to roast the millet myself. I placed it in a cookie sheet in a single layer and, starting at 250 degrees, raised the temperature 25 degrees every 15 minutes until it was nicely darkened, about 1.5 hours.

I had a large amount of boiloff, I guess due to the low volume, so I had to add a half gallon of water to reach the full volume and a starting gravity of 1.056.

A week and a half later, the beer was still very hazy, with lots of suspended particulate matter. I racked to secondary and let it sit for another week. By the end of the second week a significant additional amount of trub had developed and the beer was noticeably more clear, so I bottled it. Final gravity measured a low 1.007, giving an alcohol percentage of 5%. This measurement did not change between primary and secondary fermentations.

The initial taste of the beer from the secondary was floral in both smell and taste, a little sour and sweet, and a fairly opaque light brown in color. I never like to evaluate a beer at this stage, warm and uncarbonated, but this beer seemed neither terrible nor very good. We will see how it tastes for real in a week or two when it's done carbonating and conditioning.