ROASTING GRAIN: Buckwheat Amber

I'm making a little batch of amber (hopefully) ale this weekend, about five liters, no clever name or labels at the moment. The only particularly noteworthy aspect is that I'm going to use up some buckwheat groats I had about in it, and I decided to home roast them a little bit.  This is the first time I've tried either of these things.






I started with about 158.8 grams of buckwheat (it's a 75 gram measuring cup).

While the oven preheated to 120 degrees Celsius, I soaked the groats briefly in cold water, shaking frequently:

I decided to rinse them because I currently only steep my grains rather than doing a proper mash.  If I were mashing with a base grain (some pale malt, say), there would be enzymes converting starches into sugars the yeast can eat, but no such process takes place in a steep, so washing a bit of excess starch off (a great deal, actually, after a few minutes the water you soak buckwheat in has turned to sludge) will help my beer's clarity and flavour.  It's also possible that steam from the water left on the grains while I roasted them would at least partly gelatinize the starches inside the groats, but I'm not really getting my hopes about that.

Finally, I put the grains in the oven for about an hour, turning them every fifteen minutes or so and increasing the temperature to 300C about halfway through.  The end result wasn't a terribly dark roast, but it has a nice nutty flavour I'm hoping will come through and should do me fine when I brew tomorrow.  Fingers crossed!