TimT
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- Joined
- 26/9/13
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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?
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?