Brewing chestnut beer

Williams hopes microbrewery will produce commercially

When he first started growing chestnuts, Lee Williams did not ever expect beer would be one of his products.

"I did it two years ago, just for the simple reason I saw I had a surplus of nuts that were not good enough for what I call my gourmet nuts," he explained.

A retired Moses Lake veterinarian, Williams first began producing chestnuts about 15 years ago at his Moses Lake home on 500 trees. He's been selling fresh chestnuts for six to seven years, separating the best from the lesser, selling only the premium.

The remaining chestnuts are air-dried for more than six months and shelled. A certain amount do not lose their inner skin, Williams explained. Those are the chestnuts he uses in his brewing.

In his research, Williams came across a beer produced in Corsica, France, which is 20 percent chestnut based.

So he approached a nephew about a year and a half ago to replicate that beer, and then decided to try and produce a beer that was 100 percent chestnut and gluten-free.

"It worked," Williams said. "The chemistry is a little bit different than normal beer, but chestnuts basically have the same nutritional content as malted barley. The only difference is we use enzymes to break that down because we can't malt it like you can do barley."

Chestnuts contain only 4 percent fat, Williams said, and one could not make beer with an oily nut like a cashew.

"If you look at the nutritional content, total carbohydrates are 23 grams and protein is about 7 percent," he said.

The brewing enzymes break down the starches and make the protein available.

"One of the things that make a beer hold the head is some of the proteins," Williams explained. "If you don't have any proteins, you still get your carbonation, but it won't make the lasting, lingering head."

Williams built equipment to chip his dried chestnuts down to the size of cracked barley. Then he roasts them, like the roasted barley used in beer.

In January, Williams sent the beer he's created to an international gluten-free beer festival in Chesterfield, England. His recipe has appeared online and in Living Without, a magazine designed for people with food sensitivities. Williams intends to take samples to a gluten-free beer and food festivavl in Seattle next March.

"There are becoming more and more gluten-free brewing companies now, generally in the microbrews-type situations," Williams said. "One of out every 133 people in the U.S. is gluten-intolerant, and we sell an awful lot of dried flour and whole dried chestnuts, which people who are gluten-intolerant can use."

He does not produce the beer for sale, only for samples. Williams sells the dried and roasted chestnut chips to home brewers. The recipe offered on his business' Web site evolves as Williams learns more.

"I just developed a good, easy recipe for the home brewers," he said.

There hasn't been a lot of response yet, Williams said, but he's looking for complete utilization of all of his products. A customer has expressed interest in starting a microbrewery and microwinery, and producing the beer, he noted.

"What I would really like to do, I would like to see one of the microbreweries get interested in it," Williams said. "And make the public aware that it's out there, and make it available through a microbrewery."

For more information, access Lee Williams' Web site at http://www.chestnuttrails.com/.