Thursday is my local club, MCZA, meeting---third Thursday at Ice Harbor Brewery, Kennewick, WA. I'm VP, and I'm concentrating on technical talks this year (there's not much written in the by-laws for the VP to do, so each one picks an area to concentrate on). As an experiment, this post and tomorrow's update will be dedicated towards my talk on malt.
Water is the main ingredient of beer and I suppose the body, but malt is the muscle and sinew of the brew. It is the life-force of the barley, in a kind of suspended animation, that converts the starch in the kernel to sugar, feeding the yeast---and us.
Ancient peoples used loaves of barley bread to make beer as we use modern malts, discovering the secret to the whole process. Basically to malt a grain (like barley), you soak the kernels in water to start the germination process. You let them go long enough so that the little embryos activate all their enzymes, preparing to grow into barley plants. Then, before they can send up their shoots, you dry them in an oven and knock off their little rootlets and bag them. They're not dead, at least not all of them. If you water the malt again, some will resume growing---at least the lightly kilned ones. Higher color malts are totally cooked.
Anyway, the enzymes are there ready to break down starch as if the little guys were still alive---even if they aren't really. Now, the malt is ready to mash---a subject of a previous and likely later talk.
There are lots of kinds of malt, including smoked malt. You can find tables that will show you how much you will extract from each kind. Some like crystal or chocolate malt do not need to be mashed, so you can use them in extract batches that are an easy way to start brewing.
Crystal malts are made by basically mashing the malt inside each kernel (turning it sweet) and then roasting it to various colors. That's why crystal malt is sweet and crunchy instead of chewy like 2-row.
For most of history, beers were brown or dark. Over time---because of the influence of pilsner beer---malts have gotten lighter in color. Now instead of using brown malt, you would use light malt plus crystal malt. Homebrewers who would like to recreate ancient styles can make a simulation of old brown beers by oven roasting malt by various recipes.
That's Pilsner Urquell's malt house over there on the left. They make an under-modified malt there that is perfect for triple decoction brewing. Virtually every pale malt you get nowadays is well modified, so if you want the old-fashioned decoction-necessary malt you will have to make it yourself. PU does. I've made several batches that taste really good, but I've yet to control the process carefully enough to end up with a light golden beer. I usually get very dark golden or copper colors. Part of the reason it's hard to control is that I tend to dry it over a fire to impart a smoky character. Cherry wood, yum.
We are lucky to have a wide variety of malts to choose from when creating or copying a particular beer---just browse though the homebrew store and look for the ones mentioned in the above links. We almost have an embarrassment of riches in as much as we can easily muddle up the flavors by using too many distinctive malts in the same brew.
If you've fallen into a rut, pick a specialty malt off the shelf and go find out what style it's for and make one. For example, get some Special B---but not too much---and make a Trappisten Dubbel.
Besides barley, other grains commonly malted are wheat and rye. Just by adding these malts you have made a specialty beer. Make a wit, kolsch, sahti, or roggenbier.
Sometimes raw grains are added to the mash, but they do not contain enzymes so the amount of raw grains must be matched to the excess of enzymes provided by the light malts (2-row, 6-row, etc).
Check out the links I've provided above and do a little poking around with Google or Dog Pile. There's a world of malt out there.
Besides all the fun of talking about different kinds of malt, we can note that the same malt types are made by lots of different maltsters...and argue about who makes the best. Endless fun! Homebrewing, what a great hobby.
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