Samuel Adams was my go to beer for years before my Celiac diagnosis.  Wanting to enjoy those unique flavors, I wrote to the folks at the Boston Beer Company to see if they had anything in the pipeline.  Here is the response:

Thank you for getting in touch with us about making a Samuel Adams gluten-free beer.  We are sorry to hear about your condition and that it prevents you from enjoying so many foods, especially Samuel Adams.

Right now, we make only traditional brewed beers, which naturally contain gluten.  We have asked our brewers to look into gluten-free beer and see whether this is something that would make sense for us to pursue.

Thank you again for letting us know about the need for gluten-free beers.

Cheers,

Todd Bellomy
Consumer Relations Representative
The Boston Beer Company
www.samueladams.com

If you have an interest in seeing a Gluten-Free Sam Adams on the market, contact them and let them know there is an interest.

After trying some of the commercial gluten free beer options, none of them were very satisfying.  For my adult beverage choices I’m not much of a liquor or cocktail fan.  That leaves wine or cider as the main, commercially available, choices.  As much as I like both, beer was a mainstay.

That left me searching for a homebrew option.  Thankfully, for Christmas, my wife was nice enough to give me a collection of vinting, brewing, and meadmaking books.  One of those was Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers, by Stephen Buhner.  In one of the appendices he references using 8oz of brown sugar and 12oz of molasses per gallon of base beer.  That lead me to put together the following recipe based on my previous experiences.

It went together in a few hours and the first signs of life are appearing in the airlock.  Initial gravity was 1.052.

I’ll let you know my results as the experiment continues.  If anyone has experience with something like this, or tries experimenting with it, let me know.  Gluten free brewing is a new world.

This is for a 1 gallon batch:

12oz Blackstrap (full flavor) Molasses
8oz Light Brown Sugar
1/5oz U.K. Fuggles pelletized hops
1/5oz U.K. Kent Golding pelletized hops
2g Safale S-04 yeast.
Enough water to equal one gallon.

Combine the molasses, sugar, and water in an 8 quart, or larger, pot.
Bring to a boil and add the Fuggles hops.
Boil for 50 minutes and then add the Golding.
Boil for 10 more minutes, remove from heat, and cool quickly to 70 degrees.
Pour into your primary fermenter, filtering off the hops in the process.
Add enough water to make sure you have a gallon.
Double check the temp.  If it is around 70 degrees, pitch the yeast, attach lid and airlock.