Unmalted Adjuncts: It’s okay to flake out sometimes
When we first got involved in homebrewing there was one thing almost every homebrewer could agree on — we weren’t going to brew like those big, flavorless breweries out there. No sir, we were going to make real beer the real way without any dodgy ingredients — true brews for true beer aficionados.
That meant we weren’t going to cheat and be cheap like the bland American brewers were. No corn, no rice — that’s just terrible for your beer. Those were the dreaded “adjuncts” and they were strictly forbidden from the real brewer’s brewhouse. If you’ve spent any time around homebrewers you know that near universal agreement is a miracle . . . or something else.
Much like a weed is simply a plant growing where you don’t want it — an adjunct is just an ingredient that isn’t one of the “core four”: Malt, water, hops, and yeast. Our last column was all about sugar and its proper place in a proper brewery. We hoped we sufficiently made the case that sugar is a wonderful ingredient with magical properties. In this column, we plan to make the same argument for unmalted and non-barley grains. The craft community has long accepted adjuncts like wheat and oats while others like corn and rice continue to draw disdainful looks. We want to change that perception.
By our definition, an adjunct is anything that adds gravity to a beer other than malted grain. So, flaked barley is an adjunct, but malted barley isn’t. By that definition, fruit can also be considered an adjunct, but we’re going to leave that for another column. (And yes, that means we’re leaving malted wheat and rye for another time too — this was a discussion that took place.)
Which brings us to the question “why use adjuncts?”
You know since we’re talking about this, we don’t consider them to be a cheat. They have their places, uses, and functions. We’ll get to those shortly. Let’s dismiss the easiest objection first — they’re cheap and that’s why they’re used. Sure, we can hear you now, “we subsidize corn and it’s cheap and in everything!” But that is actually not the case at all. Technical Editor Ashton Lewis confirmed that BSG Craftbrew expects to pay roughly double the price for flaked corn and rice compared to other flaked grains. Budweiser has always been slagged as being cheap because of its use of rice. Before the mega merger that formed Anheuser-Busch-InBev (ABI), the most expensive ingredient in Budweiser was that rice — a special variety grown by their specification.
The real reason corn and rice were used was because they were widely available and they were able to soften the harsh and hazy nature of American six-row barley when adjunct brewing first became a thing. Because American malt was so enzymatically supercharged, American brewers — particularly those of German/Bavarian descent trying to make beers in the New World — discovered they could use the plentiful stores of corn and rice to lower the protein levels in the finished beer. By using these adjuncts, they could produce a beer that was as clear and clean tasting as they would have expected in Bavaria. Well, at least good enough for the thirsty immigrants of central Europe flooding the US at the time.
Fast forward a century and American barley has become world class. So why use adjuncts in this day and age? American lager brewers use them to keep the beer body and finish light — a completely valid goal. What about you?
Corn and Rice
Let’s look at our infamous friends, the much maligned rice and corn. Like almost all adjuncts, they are routinely used to increase the gravity while lightening the body of the beer — just like sugar in our March-April 2020 issue’s column. Basic table sugar has very little flavor impact. Rice and corn, being more complex than simple sugar molecules, can’t help but have varying degrees of impact beyond our ubiquitous table sugar.
Your plain white rice might have very little impact, but when you pay attention what you’ll start to see is that rice, in general, adds sweetness with a crisp finish. For Drew, he’s always reminded of the Chinese rice candies his mom would pick up from Chinatown with their sweet rice papers that dissolved in a sugary cloud and left a gummy candy that quickly vanished. When you begin to play with others like jasmine or basmati or even wild rice (OK, not technically rice, but humor us), you’ll find additional flavors brought to the table like intense nuttiness [basmati] or bright floral perfume [jasmine]. Wild rice is a bit of a wild card.
With corn, sadly, we haven’t had as varied an experience — even playing with blue/purple/red corn — the flavors tend to be the same, an intense sweetness. Unlike rice, where you get a crisp finish, with corn you get an omnipresent honeyed sweetness that smells like sweetened puffed corn cereal. Perceptually, it’s interesting because at least in our experience — you can have similar final gravities with a rice beer and a corn beer and the corny beer will always taste sweeter.
Wheat
While corn and rice are the most popular grain adjuncts commercially, the most accepted adjunct in the beer world, until recently, is wheat. It’s a grain so lovely in beer that the Bavarians passed a whole law and tradition to restrict its use in beer. But then again, most of the wheat used in beer is malted wheat (see your hefeweizens for instance) — what about unmalted wheat?
For us, unmalted wheat always tastes more fluffy and doughy than when malted wheat is used. Think of the difference between a hefeweizen (malted wheat) and a Belgian witbier (unmalted wheat). And that’s precisely where we’d use unmalted wheat — all the wits and old white ales of Europe.
What about foam? When we first started brewing, just about every recipe out there included a dose of wheat in order to “improve the head.” Theory was that the extra proteins in the wheat gave extra structure to the bubbles we wanted to see floating like clouds on top of our pint. These days, brewers seem content to skip the wheat malt and the extra mouthfeel in favor of properly handling the beer to produce a quality foam.
Oats
Anyone who’s listened to our podcast (Experimental Brewing) knows Drew is flat out obsessed with oats. They seem to mysteriously work their way into a shocking number of his beers. (There’s an entire episode — 39 minutes worth — of Drew talking through oats. It’s fun, for certain definitions of the word fun.) But the humble oat has a long and storied history in brewing. For the same reason we love it in our breakfast, that rich unctuous and satisfying sensation of fullness they give. Oats are a welcome addition in beer when used properly.
Because they provide a rich fattiness and roundness in the brew, it’s no surprise that oats were used in dark roasty beers like stouts to cut the burn or in white and farmhouse ales that needed a little extra oomph. Where the oat seemed to be fading in a world of lagers and craft beers, there has been a resurgence thanks to the rise of hazy IPAs. A number of examples, commercial and homebrew, take advantage of the haziness inherent in an oat-y brew and, like with stouts, uses their richness to back off the hop bitterness to allow more hop oil to shine.
Denny has tried using oats in beers like American pale ale and has had less than impressive results. In his case, it almost seemed like the oats thinned the body and reduced foam. It could certainly have been something he was doing wrong, but he suspects it might be from old, substandard oats that were going rancid. He’s since started storing oats in the freezer and seems to be having better results.
Rye
Where Drew is known for oats, Denny is most certainly known for rye. While Denny’s Wry Smile RyePA uses rye malt, there are still flavor reasons to use unmalted rye. Like unmalted wheat, unmalted rye brings a kind of “fluffiness” to the beer and less of the spicy, earthy flavor you get from malted rye.
How to Use
Before you use an adjunct; you need to assess its place in your recipe, just like you would for any other ingredient. Think about what you expect to get from it and choose the right adjunct to achieve your goal. Sometimes that goal is flavor or body, and sometimes it’s stylistic accuracy. For instance, you could use sugar to lighten an American light lager, but rice or corn is more to style.
Do you want dry crispiness with a hint of ephemeral sweetness? Rice is your party player. How about a honey-like sweetness that pervades but doesn’t add floral notes or a ton of body? Corn it up! Want a fluffy body without a rich body — wheat. Want the fluffy body with a lot of richness? Choose oats. Want spice and chewiness? Rye is your go-to grain.
Barley is a bit of a lucky stroke for beer brewers. Not all starch is equally easy to work with. Starches in our cereals get bound up in cage-like structures that require water and a certain level of heat to be useable. Apply the right amount of heat to your grain mush and watch the starches fly free. In the case of our all-barley mash, they fly free into the chomping jaws of alpha- and beta-amylase enzymes and are crunched into yeast-friendly sugars. Barley, not only provides the enzymes, but the temperature at which the starches bust free (aka the gelatinization temperature) is lower than what we mash at. In other words, mix barley and strike water and those starches start coming loose immediately. The same is true of wheat, rye, and oats. They all gelatinize at mash temperatures.
Corn and rice are a different story. Unfortunately, both of them have gelatinization temperatures well above where we normally mash. American brewers developed a whole cereal cooking process akin to decoction mashing with lave-like porridge made up of finely crushed corn/rice and water. It’s a mess, it’s a pain, don’t do it. (If you want further instructions listen to Episode 65 of the Brew Files “American Nothingness” — please be careful!)
Fortunately for those of us less dedicated to formal practices, there is a solution — flakes! They are produced by steaming and softening grain kernels and then smashing them between giant heated rollers. The end result is a grain that is ready for immediate mash usage. We don’t find any appreciable taste difference from using flakes instead of the more laborious and dangerous mashing techniques needed with unprocessed corn and rice.
The next time you create a recipe, or tweak an old one, think about the place adjuncts might have in it. You may discover that adjuncts aren’t just for macro lagers anymore!
