Specialty Grains
The most fun in brewing comes from designing recipes and choosing ingredients. There is just no end to it. A homebrewer, no matter how young, could make a different beer every day of his or her life. By the time he reached a ripe old age of 90 or so, he wouldn’t have scratched the surface of the possible recipes he could have chosen.
Of course if he drinks all that beer, he may never see 90, but that’s a whole different subject.
Just for fun, think about all the possible beers you could make. There are about 150 varieties of malt extract, 15 specialty grains, 25 hops, and 32 yeast varieties easily available to a homebrewer today. If you were to design beers only around those ingredients, using two specialty grains and three hop additions in each recipe, you could make an awful lot of different beers. In fact, if you change only one major component in each batch, more than 16 billion different brews are possible!
The remarkable thing about this mental exercise is that all the beers would be different. They would run the entire range from light to dark, hoppy to mild, and from mediocre to good to great. A major component would be different in each beer, and no two of them would be exactly the same. That’s what makes this hobby so much fun.
Some of the most important beer ingredients available are the specialty grains, also called specialty malts. A specialty grain is any brewing grain other than plain malted barley.
Plain malted barley is the basis of beer. Barley from the field is made “brewable” by putting it through the malting process.
In malting, barley is soaked in water until the seed sprouts, then it is gently heated and dried to kill the live seed and preserve it. In starting to sprout, the barley seed produces starches and enzymes for the purpose of growing a new barley plant. If you look at a diagram of a barley grain, or seed, it’s a lot like an egg. A small part of the grain is actually alive, but most of it is a food reservoir for the new plant to draw on.
Gentle heating and drying at the malting company makes malted barley a stable product that can be shipped and stored. When the malt is crushed, mixed with water, and kept within a narrow temperature range (about 135° to 160° F), the enzymes that were inside the grain break down the starches into fermentable sugars. These fermentable sugars can then be consumed by yeast cells and changed into carbon dioxide gas and ethyl alcohol—in other words, beer!
How Extract is Made
It doesn’t matter whether you are talking about homebrewed beer made from malt extract or from all grain, the process is the same. In a brewery, malted barley is taken through the mashing process to break the starches into fermentable sugars. This reaction is called “conversion”; it converts the starches into sugars. The spent grains are rinsed and removed in a process called “sparging,” which leaves unfermented beer known as “wort.” At this point, a brewery moves the liquid wort into a kettle, brings it to a boil, adds hops, and goes ahead with the brewing process just like a homebrewer does on his or her kitchen stove.
A malt extract manufacturer does the same thing. If an unhopped extract is being made, hops are not added, of course. When a brewery reaches the end of the boil, the wort is cooled, transferred to a fermenter, and yeast is introduced. At the end of the boil, a malt extract manufacturer transfers the wort to a vacuum chamber and evaporates the water. Most of the water is removed to make malt extract syrup. All the water is removed to make dry malt extract.
Without specialty grains, only a few beer styles can be made. Malted barley is very light in color, as great care has been taken not to scorch it during the drying process. It usually has a color of four or less on the Lovibond scale (a color scale that ranges from zero, clear, to 120, very dark), and by itself it will make American Lager, European Lager, and a few other beer styles that are light in color. If you use a lot of malted barley, either in the form of grain or malt extract, it will make a heavy-bodied, malty beer that is still pretty light in color and flavor, such as an Oktoberfest or Hellesbock.
To make other beer styles, specialty grains are used. Commercial brewers and all-grain homebrewers enjoy an advantage here, because they usually just add whatever specialty grains they are using to the mixture of grains in their mash. To a commercial or all-grain brewer, all the grains are mixed. Whatever converts is welcome to do so, and whatever doesn’t still adds the desired color and flavor to their beer! Some specialty grains need to go through this mashing process. Malt extract brewers cannot use these grains or if they do, they need to do a partial mash to add to their malt extract.
Grains that need to be mashed are those that are convertible. That is, they contain starches that can be broken down by enzymes into fermentable sugars, just like plain malted barley. Many of these grains are considered specialty grains by American homebrewers, but they really aren’t. Often, they are just malted barley from somewhere else.
For authenticity, many all-grain brewers like to make their pale ales from English malt, Oktoberfests from German malt, Belgian Ales from Belgian malt, etc. That’s perfectly reasonable. Every country has its own growing conditions, barley varieties, and methods of malting grain. To be authentic, it may make a lot of sense to use the ingredients those beers are brewed from in their home countries. That doesn’t mean those are specialty grains, though; they are malted barley. That is, they need to go through the mashing process.
The specialty grains that can be easily used by malt extract brewers and all-grainers alike are those that have been processed in such a way that they will not convert through mashing. This includes most of the specialty grains, so almost all beer styles are possible by brewing with malt extract.
Specialty grains that can be used in this way are usually barley, malted or unmalted, that has been treated differently at the malting company. Crystal malt is one of the specialty grains. It is available in a whole range of colors, from 20 to 120 Lovibond.
Crystal malt is malted barley that is heated while wet. This is done under controlled conditions, and the starches are converted and caramelized within the grain. That’s why crystal malt is sometimes called caramel malt. Crystal malt is the most common specialty grain used by homebrewers, and it’s a great ingredient. It enhances the sweet character of the beer, increases the body, and it aids in head retention. It can be used to control the color of the finished beer, from gold to quite dark depending on what the brewer wants.
Some other specialty grains that are easy for everyone to use are roasted barley, biscuit malt, special roast, black patent malt, black barley, and chocolate malt. Each of these was made in a different way, and each will add different qualities to the beer you are making.
Using these grains is very simple. To make an all-grain beer, just crush all the grains together, specialty grains as well as brewing grains. The whole grist goes through the mashing process, and the spent grains are sparged out before the wort is heated over 170° F.
When making beer from malt extract, the specialty grains are the first thing to add. Start by putting a brewpot full of water on the stove to heat. Use hot water out of the tap, which gives you a starting temperature near 104° F. When the water is starting to heat, put the specialty grains in a small cheesecloth bag, tie a knot in the top, and add the bag to the water. While the water is heating, the grain bag bobs around like a tea bag and you can see the color coming out of the grains into the water.
As the water heats, keep a thermometer in it. Remember, you are trying to use specialty grains as if they had been in the original mash when the malt extract was made. That original mash stopped at 160° F, and the grains were probably rinsed (sparged) near 170° F. When the temperature approaches 170° F, dunk the bag of specialty grain around in the water to get all the goodness out of the grain. Then take the bag out.
Some old recipes tell homebrewers to boil grains. Never do that. The grain husks that are normally unused are full of starches that become soluble with temperature and will make your beer cloudy. Also, the husks contain tannin that will be extracted into your beer at higher temperatures. Have you ever bitten into a grape seed? That sharp, astringent taste is tannin. Astringency is often encountered as a beer defect. It usually means that a grain brewer sparged too long or got his sparge water too hot. In an extract beer, it means the brewer overheated his specialty grain.
After removing the specialty grain and the grain bag, just go ahead with the brewing process. The pot continues to heat. When the liquid begins to boil, add malt extract and hops and go from there.
Some brewers put loose specialty grains directly into the brewpot. There is nothing wrong with this as far as the beer is concerned, but it’s a lot of trouble to strain them all out. The cheesecloth bag works best for this. A small bag will hold about a pound of grain, and that is usually enough. Occasionally, in some barley wine or other extremely heavy beer, you may have to use two bags.
As far as the types and amounts of specialty grains to use, there are a lot of published recipes to go by. In time experience will give you an instinct for the flavor and color characteristics you can get from each grain, and you will know how much of it to use to get the effects you want. In the meantime, you can get a lot of good information from the “Guidelines for Brewing 5 Gallons of Traditional Beer” on pages 166 through 173 of The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing by Charlie Papazian. It is a chart with general guidelines for most beer styles. It suggests weights and types of specialty grain for almost any beer you want to make.
Preparing the Grains
Specialty grains used in homebrewing are usually crushed, but not always. Crushing allows much more extraction of both flavor and color. You can actually make a dark beer, about the color of root beer, with light malt extract and a half-pound of crushed medium crystal malt. In a few beers it’s okay to leave the specialty grains whole. By doing that you still get some flavor characteristics into the beer, but you limit color extraction and keep the color light.
For example, try two ounces of uncrushed chocolate malt in a light beer such as American lager. You probably won’t find any published recipes like that, but a small amount of chocolate malt in such a delicate beer style will add a good nut-like aftertaste to the malt character.
If you do crush specialty grains, don’t grind them into flour. Just crush them so each grain husk is broken. If you are all-grain brewing a British pale ale, you might use eight pounds of malted barley, four ounces of 20° Lovibond crystal malt, and two ounces of chocolate malt. Simply weigh those whole grains by pouring them into a grocery bag, then run the mixture through a grain mill.
Crush the two specialty grains together and put them in a cheesecloth bag. If you don’t have a grain mill, a rolling pin works fine on most specialty grains. Unlike malted barley, they are brittle and the grains break easily. To make the same beer with malt extract, use light, unhopped extract.
A big underlying principle here is that all beer styles are made from light, unhopped malt extract. That is true whether the malt extract comes from a can or box used by a homebrewer, or whether the malt extract is being made directly from grain by a commercial brewer or all-grain homebrewer. Light, unhopped malt extract, wherever it comes from, is like a blank page to write on. Specialty grain, hops, other ingredients, and brewing procedure can change that beer into any of those billions of possible beers. That part of homebrewing is fascinating.
As you explore this great homebrewing hobby, don’t be afraid to experiment. If homebrewers have a fault, it is that they are too conservative. An indication of this is how long it takes new ingredients to catch on. Three great new specialty grains, biscuit malt, special roast, and black barley, have been available for several years now. Unfortunately, very few brewers are using them, because they don’t appear in the homebrewing books that were published 10 or 12 years ago.
Many professional homebrew people have been brewing for a long time. But just because they publish a recipe, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t change it or try something entirely different. There are billions of possible beers waiting to be made, and we should all be having fun trying to find the best ones.
