An Introduction To: Malted Barley
I am back with another blog post and I hope everyone has been safe and sound! The weather seems to be improving finally and we are approaching an IPA season.
I will be continuing with the short introductory posts about beer and ingredients; and today I will be discussing the importance of malted barley in brewing and also giving some brief history and so on - standard.
So... short and sweet!
Even though raw ingredients like rye, wheat, oats, millet, rice and corn have all been used for brewing, barley is the preferred type of grain used for beer. However, the starch in a grain of barley is not yet ready to be fermented into alcohol, thus the barley is generally converted into 'malted barley' or 'malt' - it is a common mistake for people to think that malt and barley are two different things, however they are completely the same thing. The process of malting generally involves soaking the barley in water
allowing it to germinate - then stopping the germination with heat. The amount of heating that barley receives will have major effects on the sort of beer that is aimed to be brewed. All the colour in beer comes from the malted barley, so, a lightly roasted malt will produce a very pale beer and deeply roasted malts will produce dark or black beers.
Therefore, if you take a lightly roasted malt and make beer from it, use an ale yeast, and the result will be a pale ale, the classic English pub beer, bitter or a golden ale. If you use a lager yeast instead, the result will be a pilsner.
On a side note, if you give the malt a little more heat, the beer becomes darker; brown ales - Newcastle Brown is a classic beer - become the ale variety. In lager beers, the cleaner tasting German dunkels (also known as dark lagers) become the counterparts.
General wisdom tells us that these darker beers are much stronger than light beers. However, on the contrary, the roasting of malt may also have the effect of ''locking up'' some of the starches in the beer so they cannot be fermented. This is because there is less food for the yeast to turn into alcohol and therefore the beers may be lower in alcohol and the unfermented material stays in the beer which gives a much thicker texture in your mouth. These beers can feel rich however may be less intoxicating than a mass-marketed lager.
More roasting: the next darker (and tasty) beers are your porters and stouts - which are also ales and rare schwarzbiers; black lagers. To make a clear distinction between the two families of beer; porters will have a lot more spin off flavours like fruity or nutty notes than schwarzbiers which indeed will be malty (sweet) but still vert clean. Both styles require coffee or chocolate notes from their dark malts. Stouts, the blackest of the ales, the addition of roasted barley may give the beer a burnt-toast aroma.
One of the most undermined beer ingredients in history, it is thanks to malt, lagers and ales come in a vast array of colours, strengths and characters.
That's all for the basics of malted barley and soon all of the beer ingredients will start to make sense.
Thanks for reading,
Weronika x
I will be continuing with the short introductory posts about beer and ingredients; and today I will be discussing the importance of malted barley in brewing and also giving some brief history and so on - standard.
So... short and sweet!
Even though raw ingredients like rye, wheat, oats, millet, rice and corn have all been used for brewing, barley is the preferred type of grain used for beer. However, the starch in a grain of barley is not yet ready to be fermented into alcohol, thus the barley is generally converted into 'malted barley' or 'malt' - it is a common mistake for people to think that malt and barley are two different things, however they are completely the same thing. The process of malting generally involves soaking the barley in waterallowing it to germinate - then stopping the germination with heat. The amount of heating that barley receives will have major effects on the sort of beer that is aimed to be brewed. All the colour in beer comes from the malted barley, so, a lightly roasted malt will produce a very pale beer and deeply roasted malts will produce dark or black beers.
Therefore, if you take a lightly roasted malt and make beer from it, use an ale yeast, and the result will be a pale ale, the classic English pub beer, bitter or a golden ale. If you use a lager yeast instead, the result will be a pilsner.
On a side note, if you give the malt a little more heat, the beer becomes darker; brown ales - Newcastle Brown is a classic beer - become the ale variety. In lager beers, the cleaner tasting German dunkels (also known as dark lagers) become the counterparts.
General wisdom tells us that these darker beers are much stronger than light beers. However, on the contrary, the roasting of malt may also have the effect of ''locking up'' some of the starches in the beer so they cannot be fermented. This is because there is less food for the yeast to turn into alcohol and therefore the beers may be lower in alcohol and the unfermented material stays in the beer which gives a much thicker texture in your mouth. These beers can feel rich however may be less intoxicating than a mass-marketed lager.
More roasting: the next darker (and tasty) beers are your porters and stouts - which are also ales and rare schwarzbiers; black lagers. To make a clear distinction between the two families of beer; porters will have a lot more spin off flavours like fruity or nutty notes than schwarzbiers which indeed will be malty (sweet) but still vert clean. Both styles require coffee or chocolate notes from their dark malts. Stouts, the blackest of the ales, the addition of roasted barley may give the beer a burnt-toast aroma. One of the most undermined beer ingredients in history, it is thanks to malt, lagers and ales come in a vast array of colours, strengths and characters.
That's all for the basics of malted barley and soon all of the beer ingredients will start to make sense.
Thanks for reading,
Weronika x
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