As a canny beer reader, you can probably name a few different hop varieties, but malts? Malts simply range from pale to dark, and the colour is a good indication of the flavour, right? Not quite. Colour is just one dimension, and Gladfield Malt’s Doug Michael says there are many other dimensions to malt. “You’ve got colour, but you’ve got to look at the chemistry of it. Malt’s a living thing with different ratios of fermentable versus unfermentable sugars. The colours come from the Maillard reaction, which is the reaction between the sugars and the proteins. If you produce a different set of sugars it will react differently. So you get different colours and different flavours, and you get it reacting differently in the beers as well. “There are 12 variables that we measure, but at the same time there’s probably an infinite amount of subjective measurements in aroma or other factors we can change – is it bready or grainy or toasty? – and we don’t measure those.” Those variables are the results of decisions made at the different stages of malting: steeping, germination, kilning and roasting. Gabi & Doug Michael at Gladfield Malt last spring. Steeping soaks the … Continue reading Malt: More Than Just a Support Act For Hops