# Vienna, Munich or MO as a general base?



## DustyRusty (3/2/21)

Hi,

Couple of years into all grain brewing. Going well but struggled to get a big malty flavour i've wanted in a lot of the beers, even with higher mash temps. Been using Coopers Pale Ale Malt as my base. I tend to brew Red Ales, Brown Ales, Stouts, the occasional Belgian or yeasty German and always a Saison around Christmas time. Considering making Vienna, Munich or Marris Otter a major part of my base bill rather than the Coopers. Anyone want to recommend which one would be the most versatile? I'd like to store all three but i don't really have the space to do that. I tend to like to buy a 25kg bag for the value too. Any recommendations? 

Thanks for your help


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## MHB (3/2/21)

I would stay with the coopers PA as a base (or any one of the quality domestic ale malts, BB Ale is my go to) and invest in some Melanoidin, Aromatic, Abby, Special W, Amber.... some of the specialty malts made to add a big malty smell and flavour to beer.
100% Vienna or Munich is going to give you a dark and full bodied beer, but you are giving up all the other choices, MO is a pale ale base malt, but its one of the most expensive options. Sure in some beers its a worthwhile investment, but in what you say you're making mostly it would be lost.
Find some examples of the type of beer you are looking to model, look for some well sourced recipes and see where they get their flavour. You could post them here but I suspect you might get a confusing array of opinions.

One tip, you can hide a lot of malt behind hops, judicious use of hops can make the same grain bill really stand up.
Mark


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## DustyRusty (3/2/21)

Thanks. This is really helpful. I have used melanoidin and often some crystal or dark crystal. Helps but not quite enough. I’ll try some of the other malts too. I wonder if I’m over hopping them too. Dry hopping everything is a constant temptation of mine... thanks again.


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## MHB (3/2/21)

Try some Aromatic say 5%, really ups the malty smell, smell and taste are strongly linked.
Mark


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## Kodos (3/2/21)

What type of yeast are you using? Some strains accentuate malt flavours more than others.


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## DustyRusty (3/2/21)

Kodos said:


> What type of yeast are you using? Some strains accentuate malt flavours more than others.



for the maltier ones: notto, US-05, S-04 mostly.


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## Hangover68 (3/2/21)

I bought a 25kg sack of BB pale malt last year to use as my base malt, so far its worked out well for the styles i have brewed.
Looking to build up small quantities of specialty malts so i can increase my range.


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## kadmium (3/2/21)

I like Crisp MO but I do mainly pale ales, English ales etc with it. 

It's not really that much more exxy when buying by the 25kg sack and I like to use quality ingredients when I can. Nit saying JW or BB ain't quality, but English MO just makes me enjoy it more I guess. That's the beauty of HB. It's like cooking, I like the French butter and then I'm smashing it with garlic and all sorts of stuff, I could just use home brand or Western Star but I like Lurpak cause I feel fancier and I (placebo) think it makes a difference. 

Thats my opinion. I bought a 25kg sack of Voyager Veloria. Don't rate it. Inconsistent mash efficiency. Use Czech Pilsner and get bang on. Use English MO get bang on. Use the Veloria, drop 6 or 7 points in OG. Pribably need to adjust the mill for that grain but that's too much hard work when I can use MO or Pils for every beer.


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## Droopy Brew (3/2/21)

Vienna makes a wonderful beer by itself. I have done a couple of SMASH beers with it, not at all dark.
Have had a 100% Munich beer and that is definitely getting darker/red category. MO is beautiful as well.

My advice- have a go at using Vienna as a base in your red ale (add some Caraaroma and rye ) and see how it goes. If you like it get a bag.


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## Markbeer (3/2/21)

I know you are talking base malt, but biscuit malt adds nice flavours without altering the colour too much. 

The brands aren't all equal so you haver to check the EBC/lovibond.


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## DustyRusty (3/2/21)

Markbeer said:


> I know you are talking base malt, but biscuit malt adds nice flavours without altering the colour too much.
> 
> The brands aren't all equal so you haver to check the EBC/lovibond.



yep I use biscuit a bit. Like Briess Special Roast too - more intense but along the same lines. Great flavours there but not the rich maltyness I’m not getting.


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## kadmium (3/2/21)

DustyRusty said:


> yep I use biscuit a bit. Like Briess Special Roast too - more intense but along the same lines. Great flavours there but not the rich maltyness I’m not getting.


Special roast adds a sourdough like tang. I use it in my ESB and enjoy it. 

Crystals lead a sweetness but not that milo / horlicks malt flavour. 

I like a solid base of MO, some biscuit and a little melanoidin. Could also try decoction mashing hahahahahahahah. Sad face. 

Honestly? Go with the MO, and as MHB suggested try backing off the hops.


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## raturay (4/2/21)

I'm still relatively inexperienced in my all grain brewing journey and haven't had a lot of success with producing malty brews. I have made a few that were very good but a lack of record keeping and now I'm not sure how I did it. I was talking to my LHB recently and he made the comment that at times he uses no, what he called hot hops, at all. Just a bit in the fermenter for some flavour and aroma. I can only agree with MHB's comment re the "judicious use of hops".
I will try it in my next attempt at my own recipe. I hint of EKG and/or Fuggles perhaps.

I I find some of the recipes from CAMRA's Brew Your Own British Ales, by Graham Wheeler, pretty useful. I ordered the book from a supplier in England a couple of years ago. I think it was $20 delivered and it arrived in a week! From Book Depository.


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## DustyRusty (4/2/21)

raturay said:


> I I find some of the recipes from CAMRA's Brew Your Own British Ales, by Graham Wheeler, pretty useful. I ordered the book from a supplier in England a couple of years ago. I think it was $20 delivered and it arrived in a week! From Book Depository.



Looks great! Just tried to order but seems to be a worldwide stock shortage on it.


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## yankinoz (4/2/21)

"Malty" covers a lot of different flavours and aromas. Your brews no doubt have some of them and what you're missimng is hard to pin down.

MO and Voyager are examples of malts that carry over particularly strong and characteristic flavours from the grain. Kilning after partial saccharification produce caramel malts that taste like, well, caramel. Kilning without that steadily raises other distinctive flavours, increasingly so from Vienna through Munich, dark Munich and melanoidin or aroma. Biscuit and Victory/Special Roast are treated a little differently. Then there's roasting. So VBeinna and MO will give quite different results as base malts.

Descriptors like nutty and biscuity are only half-accurate.

Some of the distinctive flavours of Vienna and Munich are particularly susceptible to oxygen. caramel and roast flavours not so much. I suspect that's a reason German breweries showed much more early interest in low-oxygen methods that British ones I visited some years ago.

So my advice is to follow all the above advice, but one malt at a time. If you use, say, a Vienna base with biscuit, medium crystal, melanoidin and Special Roast (there are recipes like that), you'll get malty tastes for certain, but not necessarily what you're looking for or know where it came from. And easy on the hops in at least the experimental phase.


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## Kodos (4/2/21)

DustyRusty said:


> for the maltier ones: notto, US-05, S-04 mostly.


Those are solid, fairly neutral yeasts, all pretty well attenuating. If you're keen to really accentuate malt flavour, maybe a lower attenuating yeast like Windsor, or one of the liquid strains like wlp-002 (English Ale) or wlp-028 (Scottish Ale).

Outside yeast, are you doing anything with water chemistry? A higher chloride to sulphate ratio can accentuate malt flavour as well.


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## DustyRusty (4/2/21)

Kodos said:


> Those are solid, fairly neutral yeasts, all pretty well attenuating. If you're keen to really accentuate malt flavour, maybe a lower attenuating yeast like Windsor, or one of the liquid strains like wlp-002 (English Ale) or wlp-028 (Scottish Ale).
> 
> Outside yeast, are you doing anything with water chemistry? A higher chloride to sulphate ratio can accentuate malt flavour as well.



Thanks. Tried Windsor and didn’t like it - just too sickly sweet. Yep tried to higher chloride ratio too. Better but not quite there yet. Thanks!


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## MHB (4/2/21)

Its rarely ever just one thing
The overall impression of a beer is the result of lots of complex interactions.
Can you give a couple of commercial examples that do fit the bill? Might help with tracking down a direction to try.

Personally I would drop Sulphate altogether, use Chloride and I use Calcium Lactate to add any extra Ca that is required once there is enough Chloride in the beer. Will assume you have removed all the Chlorine from your water.

Might be a bit left field but if you have a good pH meter, have a look at your finished beer pH a couple of points either side of say 4.1pH can make a big difference, I would be tweaking the beer pH post fermentation, or at least doing a couple of glass sized taste comparisons and see if that helps.
Mark


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## DustyRusty (4/2/21)

thanks mate. I kind of realised this when i bought a Shepherd Neame Kentish Strong Ale and was instantly hit by the bit maltiness and flavour. My beers, while good had more of a crispness to them without the richness. I attempted a British Strong Ale with a high temp mash, some crystal and biscuit and went very easy on hops. It was sweet but at the same time tasted a bit like canned homebrew - just too simple and lacking in the same kind of flavour. I like my reds, browns, stouts etc but all of them are too 'American' rather than English. They just don't have the rich maltiness i'm quite looking for. DId a dunkel recently and that is better (lots of munich malt) but nothing like the Shepherd Neame in it's malty richness.

i used about 70% RO water to 30% local water (Perth). Water here is very high in chloride, so i tend not to add much. I need gypsum to add calcium. If i don't, i'm easily below the calcium i need for a healthy ferment.

Thanks for the thoughts on ph - i haven't focused on this much bar designing a recipe around a target ph. thanks everyone!


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## DustyRusty (4/2/21)

Hobgoblin is another one that has something close to what I'm looking for.


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## shacked (4/2/21)

I like brewing with Voyager Vienna as a base malt (well all of the voyager malts) but can I suggest that you try brewing a couple of low hop rate beers with 100% vienna and 100% munich with a clean yeast? That way you'll get a first hand understanding of what the malt brings to the beer and you can base your decisions on that.


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## MHB (4/2/21)

Ok nothing wrong with either of those and having a look at them -
Both ~1.060 OG, Both ~30IBU, Both more hops early and less late (from the better recipes/info I can find).
Might give you some directions to start looking.

Shepheard's Neame makes a bit of noise about their water coming from a Chalk aquifer, I would take that with a pinch of salt (sorry) sounds more like marketing spin than brewing science. I would think they will be modifying the hell out of their water, I would stay away from Gypsum, takes very little to make the beer quite harsh.

Note that both beers are well attenuated, mashing hot will head more toward sweet than malty. The 1698 claims to be just pale malt, Hobgoblin is more of a mixed bag, the best clone I have seen was by "Orfy" The recipe in Brewers Friend is well worth a bash.
Mark


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## DustyRusty (4/2/21)

Thanks for all your help mark. How do I get the calcium level up without gypsum? I could just add more chloride but we’d get to very high levels of chloride to hit the calcium levels. Chalk is alternative but everything I’ve read suggests it’s virtually impossible to dissolve, making the addition fairly pointless.


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## kadmium (4/2/21)

DustyRusty said:


> Thanks for all your help mark. How do I get the calcium level up without gypsum? I could just add more chloride but we’d get to very high levels of chloride to hit the calcium levels. Chalk is alternative but everything I’ve read suggests it’s virtually impossible to dissolve, making the addition fairly pointless.


Chalk will also add bicarbonate. 

Use calcium lactate as MHB suggested and adjust pH with lactic acid as needed.


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## MHB (4/2/21)

Well close Carbonate in any case, pretty hard to hit your mash pH with much in your water.
Chalk will dissolve if there is dissolved CO2 in the water so plenty of mineral waters have a swag of Carbonate.
In a mash, it is pretty much insoluble but it will react with acid, and even the acidic Maillard products in dark malts.
Which is why where the water was high in carbonates (London, Dublin...) the beers were traditionally dark, to neutralise the carbonate.
These days a half decent pH meter isn't too expensive and is a very good investment.
Mark


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## NattyJ (4/2/21)

Markbeer said:


> I know you are talking base malt, but biscuit malt adds nice flavours without altering the colour too much.
> 
> The brands aren't all equal so you haver to check the EBC/lovibond.


+1


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## DustyRusty (4/2/21)

It seems like Calcium Lactate doesn't feature in Brewers Friend or most of the water spreadsheets/apps/software. How do i calculate it?


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## MHB (4/2/21)

My local stocks it, its about 13% Calcium by weight and has that info on the label. Its pretty easy to calculate how much you want to add, just work out how much Ca you want and multiply by percentage. Sample equation on the label to.
Used with Lactic acid it forms a very powerful buffer and will help lock your pH in where you want it. Works better than the pH setting powders and costs less.
Mark


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## DustyRusty (4/2/21)

MHB said:


> My local stocks it, its about 13% Calcium by weight and has that info on the label. Its pretty easy to calculate how much you want to add, just work out how much Ca you want and multiply by percentage. Sample equation on the label to.
> Used with Lactic acid it forms a very powerful buffer and will help lock your pH in where you want it. Works better than the pH setting powders and costs less.
> Mark



ok that sounds simple. But does it affect ph at all? I already use lactic acid but wasn’t sure if the Calcium Lactate raises or lowers it too. Thanks again for all the help


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## MHB (4/2/21)

This is pretty important to understand if you want to play with water chemistry.
None of the common salts change the pH much in and of them selves, most in solution have a pH close to 7 (not Carbonates/BiCarbonates...).
How they change the pH is by Ca reacting with Phosphates from the malt, this forms insoluble Calcium Phosphates and leave H Ions in solution. pH is the count of the number of H ions in solution.
Calcium from any source reacts with and reduces the pH by the same mechanism. Clearly the limiting factor is the amount of Phosphate available. Some is freely soluble, some bound up in organic complexes, the free stuff reacts quickly and lowers the pH to mashing range, some becomes available during the mash, boil and ferment which is in part why the pH falls at every stage of the brewing process.
But (time) once you have used up all the available Phosphates adding more salts wont help you much.

Acids are different in that they just add H ions. Lowers the pH
Bases (Alkaline) like Carbonates mop up H ions less of them and the pH will rise. Which is why its pretty crazy to be adding carbonates to anything other than very dark beers. Dark beers get some of their acidity from Melanoidins and other Maillard products and can be too acidic (under the recommended mashing range)

If you add 100ppm of Ca in the form of Chloride, Sulphate or Lactate its the 100ppm of Ca that will affect the pH and if they are all fully dissolved to pretty much the same amount. Where it changes and what I like about Lactate is that both Cl and SO4 have pretty emphatic effects on flavour, Lactate doesn't so we can add the ideal amount of either/both Cl and SO4 then bring the Ca to target without screwing with the flavour we want.

Where it gets much more complex is when we start to look at buffers, if your interested Kai at Braukaiser treats the subject very well, well worth a read.
Buffers resist change in pH, a well designed buffer complex will basically superglue your pH right where you put it and it wont move much at all. Lactate/Lactic Acid falls into this class - very handy.
Mark


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## DustyRusty (4/2/21)

Great. This is great news. Never thought it was possible to raise calcium without either Chloride or gypsum. Was always stuck adding gypsum to everything. Looks like this has solved it. Yep sounds like I need to do some more work on Ph. Thanks again mate big help today.


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## An Ankoù (5/2/21)

DustyRusty said:


> Hi,
> 
> Couple of years into all grain brewing. Going well but struggled to get a big malty flavour i've wanted in a lot of the beers, even with higher mash temps. Been using Coopers Pale Ale Malt as my base. I tend to brew Red Ales, Brown Ales, Stouts, the occasional Belgian or yeasty German and always a Saison around Christmas time. Considering making Vienna, Munich or Marris Otter a major part of my base bill rather than the Coopers. Anyone want to recommend which one would be the most versatile? I'd like to store all three but i don't really have the space to do that. I tend to like to buy a 25kg bag for the value too. Any recommendations?
> 
> Thanks for your help


I recently thought of having a go at an altbier (German "old (fashioned) beer"). I'd never tried the style before, but something about the recipe made me think it would be a good'n. As soon as you said "big. malty flavour" I thought of this: it's really malty, but without the cloying sweetness afforded by adding loads of crystal malt. Here's the recipe if you want to try it yourself:

Batch size 23 litres. OG 1050. Expected FG 1012. IBUs 35

Dusseldorf water is hard so 2 tsp Calcium Sulphate and all water treated for chlorine / chloramine anyway.
3 Kg Bestmalz Pilsner malt
2.5 Kg Bestmalz Munich 15 ebc
350 g Wheat malt
145 g Caramunich III
75 g Carafa Special # 3
Magnum to 25 IBUs and Saaz to 10 IBUs FWH
I'd planned a flameout addition of 12g Saaz, but didn't do it in the end.

75 minute boil. ½ tablet of protofloc last 15 minutes.
Collected 26 litres at 1049. Pitched with Wyeast 1007, which is now going like something that properly belongs in Mordor. Have moved it into a cold room where ambient temp is 12-13 C. Bottom of fermentation range for 1007 is 13C.

You don't need to use Bestmalz. It's just that that's what I had in stock.

By the way, MO isn't especially expensive here, but I'm not a great fan unless I'm copying a commercial beer that uses it.


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## DustyRusty (19/3/21)

Just am update. Very positive results. Brewed this:

21Litre Batch

3.5kg BB Alt Malt
1.5kg Weyermann Munich T2
200g JW Light Crystal 
320g Flaked Barley
200g Melanoidin
75g Roasted Barley 

20g Magnum (10.2%) 30min
15g Cascade (5.3%) 10min
15g Centennial (10%) 10min
IBU: 29.24 

Yeast: S-04

Mash temp 67c for 45 min mash. 
OG: 1.059
FG: 1.014

Split my dechlorinated tap water with RO water adding Calcium Lactate and a small amount of Gypsum (0.25tsp - my water has no sulfate in it). Ended up with this:

Calcium: 75.3
Magnesium: 1.7
Sodium: 48.4
Chloride: 73.2
Sulfate: 24.6
Bicarbonate: 0.164

Thanks to your help, it seems that reducing hops, using a little munich and using Calcium Lactate rather than gypsum resulted in a much tastier and smoother beer than I had been making. The dominant bitterness is gone and i can taste and smell the malts. It tastes remarkably like Hobgoblin (and looks identical). Best beer I've made in a very long time. I still have some work to do to get a bigger malty richness but i believe this is a perfect starting point and i can adjust malts, hops and salts to get me there. 

Thanks again!


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