Grain Flavour / Profile ?

[shawnheiderich]

Hi all very new to All grain Brewing (well all beer brewing as well) and I have had a search around for the differnt tastes that grains impart on beer but with no luck. So my question is how do you manipulate your grain bill to get different flavours? For example Crystal grains give more sweetness ? and add colour depending on their type is that correct ? There must be quite a few grains out there doing different things to flavour in beer is there a cheat sheet or do people just gain knowledge over time? I am not after to much techo info but if i come across a recipe that I like but want to change it the taste slightly I have an idea where to start.

Thanks Shawn

 

[voota]

http://www.brewhaus.com.au/html/Grain.html

Thats a good start, click on each malt company to see the flavours they say their grains give.

The best advice I can give is to buy an Ingredient/recipe oriented book, such as 'Designing great beers'

hope this helps you a little.

 

[Simon W]

Hi Shawn
The Beersmith program has descriptions for all the grains in its database, other similar programs probably do too.
The free online book How To Brew has a couple of descriptions in it too.

 

[blackbock]

This is not an easy thing to do (describing tastes in words is always hard) but in addition to this the different maltsters produce malts of the same name but with very different flavours. For example, many brewers on this forum will attest that the Joe White Vienna is not at all a good example of its type. Add to this the differences between English, Australian and German crystal malts and you pretty soon come to the conclusion that the best way is to try them all!

 

[mika]

I've got the books but it's hard to relate taste, so I'm just brewing every style of beer there is and then coming back and altering the grain recipe a bit to see what it influences.
Means, you have to :chug: a lot, but it's all in the name of research.

 

[braufrau]

The new craftbrewer site is handy!

 

[Adzmax]

I agree, very cool with the grain pics etc huh!