Three Worked Beers
The pale target is closest — substantially Bard's flagship, with its production numbers intact. The dark target assembles a real production specialty malt into a recipe nobody ran. The hop-forward target is the most speculative of the three. Numbers are graded Record (measured in Bard's production or an independent laboratory panel), Published (a cited source on this site), or Proposed (reasoned from the pages cited, never brewed).
There are no tasting notes on this page. We haven't tasted these beers, and inventing what they'd taste like is the one thing this site won't do.
The run sheets
Everything you need to brew. The explanation for each choice is one section down, linked from every beer.
Shared backbone — all three
All three start from the same process, because changing everything at once teaches nothing. Every value below is Record.
| Stage | Setting |
|---|---|
| Initial water | 2.2–3.0 L/kg (about 1.0–1.4 qt/lb) |
| Mash pH | 5.5–5.6, measured and recorded |
| Calcium | ~100 ppm |
| Liquefaction | 190°F (88°C), 60 min, continuous mixing |
| Conversion | The variable — see each beer below |
| Mash-out | 180°F (82°C), 10 min |
| Rice hulls | ~5% of malt weight at mash-out when bed behaviour is uncertain; production ran ~4.8% |
Stop condition: if mash-out doesn't reach 180°F (82°C), glucoamylase keeps working in the kettle and the beer finishes thinner than the numbers predict. Hold until it does.
The 190°F liquefaction baseline is a protected position — don't trim it on a first attempt. Why it exists.
1 · Pale or golden — the closest to proven
| Element | Setting | Grade |
|---|---|---|
| Grist | 100% pale sorghum malt | Record |
| Conversion | 145°F (63°C), 45 + 10 min — the Reliable Mash | Record |
| Enzymes | External, staged by temperature | Record |
| Wort | 10.5°P | Record |
| Bitterness | 18 IBU total, five of them tetra extract | Record |
| Hops | CTZ 90 min (~13% alpha); Sterling 15 min | Record |
| Yeast | American ale, 20.5°C; diacetyl rest at 5°P / 22°C; crash to 1°C | Record |
| Expected finish | ~90% apparent attenuation, 1.004 FG, under 5% ABV | Record — independent lab panel, Feb 2019 |
→ Why this one works, and how it fails
2 · Dark — roast is where sorghum is strongest
| Element | Setting | Grade |
|---|---|---|
| Base | Pale sorghum malt; red sorghum malt for colour correction | Record — the working strategy |
| Specialty | Roasted sorghum malt, 65–75 °L crystal range — Bard's C-70 | Record, 2018 roast programme |
| Use rate | One 50 lb (22.7 kg) bag on a 7 bbl (8.2 hL) batch reached ~11 SRM | Record |
| Conversion | 145°F (63°C), 45 + 10 min | Record |
| Bitterness | 18–22 IBU, five from tetra extract | Proposed |
| Yeast | American ale, as the pale | Proposed |
→ Why this one works, and how it fails
3 · Hop-forward — the hardest of the three
| Element | Setting | Grade |
|---|---|---|
| Grist | Pale sorghum malt; consider a rice split at 10–25% for a drier, paler platform | Proposed — see Splitting the Grist |
| Conversion | 132°F (56°C), 100 min for a maltose-forward wort with more body to carry hops | Proposed |
| Bitterness | 25–35 IBU, of which ~5 IBU must be tetra extract | Proposed, except the 5 IBU |
| Hops | German or noble-adjacent for bittering and late additions | Practice, not a finding |
| Yeast | American ale, cool end of range | Proposed |
The ~5 IBU tetra requirement isn't optional here. At 25–35 IBU you should expect to need it more, not less.
→ Why this one is hard, and how it fails
1 · Pale or golden
This is substantially the flagship: a clean, dry, restrained beer that sold for years.
Why it reads clean. Dosed enzymes are carbohydrases — they make sugar and no amino nitrogen, so they supply the substrate for alcohol without the precursors for esters. Our flavour and sensory directory names that route the one with the least flavour contribution by construction. The pale beer isn't clean by accident. It's clean because the conversion route builds it that way.
The failure mode: it finishes thin and reads empty. At 90% attenuation there's very little residual sweetness, and on a sorghum base nothing else hides the gap. When that happens the fault is usually mash-out, not the recipe — reaching 180°F (82°C) denatures glucoamylase, and a mash-out that stalls short leaves it working in the kettle.
The dial if you want it rounder: move the conversion rest down toward the Maltose Mash's 132°F (56°C) and accept a longer hold. Proposed — the Maltose Mash states its own status: the chemistry is proven at scale through extract, and the brewhouse sheet carries a research-brew label until someone measures a run of it.
If you want more ester potential rather than less dryness, the lever is the conversion route itself. Koji-grown enzymes bring proteases alongside amylases and measured 24% more FAN on sorghum — documented, not adopted here.
2 · Dark
Roast is the one direction where the grain's own character works with the style instead of against it.
The failure mode: darker isn't better. "Darker only means darker. The beer still has to taste right." A roasted malt pushed past what the beer wants produces colour and harshness without depth.
Two honest limits on this target. Bard's roast programme couldn't reach darker levels without dedicated capacity — "to go darker, we will need our own roaster" is in the record verbatim. And the roast schedule itself was never recovered — the contract roaster kept it. A working starting point is on Sorghum Base and Roasted Sorghum Malt, and it's Craig-confirmed guidance rather than the original programme.
Cost note for anyone malting this themselves: the roast took moisture from 13% to just under 4%, with further loss in process. Price the shrink, not the oven time.
A lever this target could use and doesn't. Controlled souring belongs to sorghum's own tradition and raises aroma rather than masking it — pito fermented with defined Lactobacillus delbrueckii and S. cerevisiae cultures produced 353 mg/L total volatiles against 229 mg/L traditional, with two days' better shelf life and no loss of overall liking. Against roast it'd be a fourth beer rather than a variant of this one, and nobody's published that combination.
3 · Hop-forward
Everything here is proposed except the constraint it has to solve.
Why the 5 IBU rule makes this beer attemptable at all. Hop load and head retention collide directly: more kettle bitterness means more hop acids working against a foam that's already fragile. Iso-α-acids stabilise foam and reduced forms outperform unmodified ones, which is the published basis for the 5 IBU rule. It buys back foam without changing flavour.
The hop choice is an impression, not evidence. German varieties sat well with sorghum malt in Bard's brewing; Saaz in particular clashed. That's twenty years of commercial practice and a consistent one — it isn't a controlled comparison. If you brew this, you're running Research Ask #1 whether you meant to or not.
The failure mode: harsh, grassy, and thin at once. Sorghum's lower residual sweetness leaves hop character less buffered, so bitterness that would read as firm on a barley base can read as sharp. If the beer comes out harsh, drop bitterness before changing hops — the ceiling is likely lower than you expect.
After the run — complete the batch record
For all three: mash temperatures and holds as measured, not as set; gravity or extract; mash pH; runoff time; and the malt lot.
| Beer | Most valuable measurements |
|---|---|
| Pale | Finishing gravity and apparent attenuation against the 1.004 / 90% benchmark; foam retention with and without the tetra swap |
| Dark | Specialty malt °L, use rate, and resulting SRM; whether roast character held or turned harsh at your rate |
| Hop-forward | IBU actually achieved, foam measured, and which hop varieties you used — that last one is the open question |
Scoring what you brewed against a shared vocabulary makes your notes comparable to someone else's. GFB-SML, the proposed sorghum malt sensory lexicon, supplies the attribute names, definitions and intensity scale. Send results.
Related
- Why Gluten-Free Beer Keeps Coming Out the Same — the levers these three use
- Splitting the Grist
- The Reliable Mash · The Maltose Mash
- Sensory Evaluation of Gluten-Free Malt · Research Asks