I transfered my buckwheat beer to a secondary fermenter tonight, after what seemed like hours of very, very thorough cleaning and sanitizing and rinsing (with small batches like this, I don't think there's any such thing as a no-rinse sanitizer, even a tiny bit of iodine will affect the end product). It's going to need some time to clear, certainly, but I'd say it was fully fermented; it had dropped to the specific gravity I expected (1.025 - taking into account I thought my original gravity was going to be 1.04ish and it turned out to be 1.065), and wasn't showing any signs of activity. It's probably going to end up cloudy anyway, but it'll get better than it is now.
Unless my Tap-a-Draft bottles are bigger than advertised (that's what I'm using as a secondary, my small-batch airlock fits it), I've got about five and a half liters of beer there, so that's not too bad in terms of racking losses and so on. Procedure-wise this has been pretty successful.
I tasted the hydrometer sample, and it's not bad... I knew it wasn't likely but was hoping in my heart for something akin to Coup de Grisou, a buckwheat beer I enjoyed in Montréal, but what I'm ending up with is, I would say... Well, it's beer. It tastes kind of beery. It'll probably go fast enough, but I'm probably going to chalk this one up to experience. I think buckwheat, even unmalted, requires a mash, next time, and it has to be a much larger percentage of the grain bill. In an effort to make this one more interesting, I've thrown four grams of Amarillo pellets into the secondary to dry-hop it; we'll see how that works out.
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