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    I notice that a lot of you guys are really suffering from the lack of beer in your lives, and I think I have found the easiest solution.  It may not taste exactly like beer, but if you use a hygrometer and add hops, I think it will make a very good substitute.  
    I have made my fair share of wine and beer, and have done many types of fermented foods.  But I got my hands on yet another fermented foods book and decided to try making miso.  I was gonna order just a small batch of koji from www.gemcultures.com but I noticed it was $17 and they were having a sale, 5 starter cultures for just $10.  I know I'm nuts, but I couldn't resist.  I asked if there was any possibility of gluten in it, they said no.  I got enough starter for 3 batches of koji (18 lbs worth) which was enough to play with.  I scrounged up several recipes for amazake, Japanese sweet rice pudding, which I had never even heard of.  You culture the koji on rice, it's a fungus, and then you stir it into cooked rice and the enzymes change the starch to sugar.  Well, they are serious, it makes the rice so sweet it's about inedible, so I took the obvious next step which was to dump some of it in a jar of peach wine I had started.  That's when I thought about you poor guys.  You can go to this website for recipes for koji and amazake and sake: http://olen.eng.ohio-state.edu/sake/index.html
    There are online brewing groups you can turn to for advice, and I note there are sites with info on making sake.  I see that if you use a sake recipe, it's gonna taste and kick like sake, but if you get advice from some beer brewing nuts, you'll probably turn out something that tastes a good bit like good beer, and is cheaper than the worst beer you can buy.  (Not to mention it's fun to do.  Not to mention you will have all your celiac friends wanting to have you around to party with.  And don't forget all your old friends, who can taste test batches for you and tell you how close you are getting to the real thing.)  Part of the trick will be to do the enzyme conversion first, and get it done and stopped before you add the yeast.  (Use the higher temp like for making amazake)  The reason for this is to dilute it to get a lower sugar reading so you can get a lower alcohol content, so you'll have a product you can sit around and enjoy instead of getting smashed on a small amount.  Once you get the dilution figured out, I think you can switch to doing it by rote, so much rice, so much koji, so much water, and go ahead and throw in the yeast.  
   http://realbeer.com/jjpalmer/Howtobrew.html has a standard beer recipe.  You will have to consider boiling the finished, diluted amazake with hops and going from there.  If you succeed, you should come back to this group with your recipe.  If you get a great batch, you may need to study this website too:  
http://www.geekswithguns.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=152
Good luck!   Donna 

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