About Craig
I helped found Bard's because “sorry, you don't get beer anymore” was a bullshit answer.
I invented the malted-sorghum beer behind Bard's and spent more than twenty years learning what gluten-free grain, malt, enzymes, process, quality control, and commercial production actually demand. Not from a clean theory exercise. From building, testing, breaking things, fixing them, and finding out which assumptions survive contact with a real brewhouse.
I came at the problem from two directions. I build software and systems, so I naturally look for the structure underneath a mess. I am also a brewer with celiac disease, so the result had to be more than technically gluten-free. It had to be beer worth drinking.
What I bring to this site
My useful experience sits where several systems collide:
- grain selection and identity;
- malting and malt character;
- mash design and external enzymes;
- production constraints and scale;
- quality records and trust;
- the commercial reality of asking people to buy the beer.
That does not make every opinion universal truth. It does mean the opinions here were earned by doing the work long enough to see where weak ingredients, weak process logic, and weak claims come apart.
The full Bard's history has its own home. Start with Bard's Story if you want the problem, the build, the malt decision, and what the work proved.
The research almost no one else was doing
Here's a strange fact about sorghum malting in North America: for most of two decades, when a lab or researcher needed to evaluate sorghum malt, there was no standard built for it that any of us could find — so they borrowed barley methods, borrowed South Africa's opaque-beer spec, or, in my own correspondence over those years, they asked me.
That work is now public. The Research Library holds the record: a 25-cultivar screening run with the USDA-ARS malt quality lab in Madison, two earlier screening rounds, and the malting and brewing protocols we developed and ran at production scale — published in full, downloadable, and citable, because whoever does this next shouldn't start from zero. It doesn't stand alone, either: Kansas State's named-hybrid malting study measured two of the same hybrids the Madison screening malted — two independent programs on the same materials is how a young field's numbers earn trust. Where the field had no standard, we've proposed drafts and invited the field to tear them apart — including the definition of truly gluten-free beer itself.
I don't claim that makes me an authority. It makes me the guy who kept the receipts — and published them.
What I am building now
Gluten Free Brewer is the resource I wish had existed when I started — the knowledge base that explains the work, and the research library that proves it.
It is not a brochure and it is not a pile of cheerful beginner tips. The job is to organize hard-earned knowledge so brewers, maltsters, founders, suppliers, researchers, and serious gluten-free beer people can understand what matters, what breaks, and what to do next.
The site uses AI to help organize material and tighten writing. AI is not the source of the knowledge, and it does not get to overrule evidence, experience, or reality. The fuller explanation is in Why This Site Exists.
I am not trying to sound polished for the sake of sounding polished. I am trying to make the work useful.
Ask me
Quick questions are free, and always will be. A mash that won't convert, a lot sheet you don't trust, which enzyme to reach for — send it and I'll answer. That's most of what people need, and I like doing it.
Bigger than a question is a project. Walking your process, standing up your QA records, developing a recipe against your lot — that's days of work, and it's how I make my living. With a budget behind it I can give it the time it deserves. The first conversation costs nothing either way; that's where we find out which one you've got.
Ask a question · Start a project
Craig
Developer. Founder. Brewer. Celiac.
Next: Why This Site Exists.