Grain bitterness

[TimT]

Grain bitterness! It's a thing! A thing I have almost no knowledge about!

1) Someone mentioned here a short-run beer by - I think - Barons(?) where they got the bitterness not from hops but from the malt itself. I think it was a dark beer, so I'm assuming it came from a dark/black malt.

2) At Pentridge Prison the other day.... (stop that! It was for the beer festival, all right? No, seriously!) I sampled a veeeeeeery tasty American amber ale, with a highly addictive burnt toffee bitterness. I asked them, "What's your secret?" They said, "It's got about 15 per cent crystal."

3) Tried the Mountain Goat Rye IPA on the weekend. Again, veeeeeeeery tasty. Again, a beautiful kind of burnt toffee bitterness somewhere in the wash of flavours. Oh, there was hoppiness in there as well, but it was much more about the malt, I thought. The story on the side of the bottle (they've always got to have a story these days) told me it was made from 'specially kilned malts'.

So then....

How do you go about selecting and getting these bitter flavours from grain into your brew? And how to avoid over-using the wrong sort of adjunct grain and turning your brew into an ale a la biscuit? It strikes me it must be a combination of selection (finding the right sort of malts to balance one another), technique (mashing temps - possibly caramelising some of the wort, too) - and other stuff (yeast selection, etc). When you use hops for bitterness you have a simple IBU guide to go by - is this not possible when you're selecting for grain bitterness?

 

[klangers]

Interesting. Bitterness in grain - to my knowledge - is essentially a form of what we normally try to avoid ie astringency. If this is the case, could it be worth experimenting with high sparging temperatures or even boiling some of the grain?

 

[TimT]

Yes - it strikes me one of the easiest way to get burnt/bitter flavours into a brew might be to take a portion of the first runnings and burn it, so you get a toffee with both sweet and bitter-astringent flavours, before adding it back to the rest of the wort.

 

[manticle]

Roast grains and dark crystals - essentially burnt.

 

[TimT]

What about the base malt - something neutral and simple, to show off the roasty flavours? Or maybe a base malt that is close to a crystal malt/biscuit malt, so it adds a bit of bitter astringency to the flavour too?

 

[technobabble66]

I'd suggest you do a tiny brew: make a 300ml wort in a 600ml water bottle and ferment it out then taste it. Don't use hops. Use only 100% med crystal for the grist, warm steep and a quick boil. Maybe do a second one w DME (or crushed & mashed grain if you can be bothered) for comparison.
I've done it once for other reasons and lemme tell you it was a serious education in the flavour profile of crystal, and more importantly the astringency it can inflict on a beer.
I personally think burnt toast flavours in the right beer can be great but that unforgettable astringency is never good.
Actually could be interesting to do a third tiny batch: Another crystal the same but with cold steeping to compare hot and cold steeping...
2c

 

[Dips Me Lid]

I was having a conversation last weekend with a mate about that burnt toffee bitterness you're talking about, we were drinking a couple of pints of St Peters Ruby Red Ale which I think has always struck me as having a highly accentuated burnt toffee flavour.

I'd be of the mind that achieving that flavour would require the right balance of hop bitterness and highly kilned malts much like a stout. I think trying to achieve it with low Ibu's might be difficult, that grain astringency could easily over power a beer if pushed to far.

I guess some test batches would probably be the go to see what sort of blends might work.

 

[TimT]

You might be right. Red Ales in particular seem to have a particularly subtle mix of hoppy bitterness and toffee bitterness. Killer Sprocket Amber Ale is the one I always remember - it has a lovely toffee taste somewhere there. Grizz is an interesting type of amber since I swear the hops seem to accentuate a malty sweetness - the flavour is caramelly, not toffee.

 

[Dips Me Lid]

It's only a guess at the end of the day based on the Red Ales I've brewed myself, I could be way off the mark.

The Killer Sprocket Amber is a cracker, I get big toffee flavour out of it as well, the last Grizz I tried was overcarbed so I couldn't really comment on it's flavour.