Great Grains for a Great Beer

1 of the superb reasons for learning to brew your own beer is to learn extra about the many different grains and ingredients that makes 1 beer far better than an additional 1. When you 1st begin your hobby of residence brewing, you no doubt got connected to a local club or association of house brewers. They can aid you learn the lingo and how to tell what the finest grains are to use in your beer. But prior to you go to the initial meeting, it could speed things up if you knew the basics.

The use of malts is at the heart of how grain contributes to a good beer. The distinction between a light beer that doesn’t have a heavy malt taste and 1 that virtually tastes like a loaf of bread all go back to what malts you pick and the process that is used during the malting and brewing of your beer. There are actually a big variety of several grains that people commonly use when brewing their own beer and you could have to take some time to brew up a few batches using many grains to see which ones capture what to you is the perfect beer taste that will make your property made beer unique. But understanding how malting works is a wonderful very first step.

Now as a residence brewing enthusiast, you will probably not actually take grain through the malting process yourself. But you should become familiar with how malting works and why there is so much variety to the outcome of the malting process. In that way you can use that knowledge when buying the malts for your beer so you can get a malt that will give you the flavor, color and intensity of beer that you are looking for.

The malting process starts with the grain to be used. The most common grains are barley, wheat or rye but others can be used from time to time. The grain is used from the seed form and steeped and germinated which gets the active part of the malting and brewing process underway. Germination, which from your high school science class you know is what happens when a seed sprouts out to become a plants, releases the store energy of the seed that was put there to jump begin the growth process. We are going to use that energy and convert it into malt mash that you can use to brew your beer.

What happens during the germination process of those grains is that the stored energy in the seed is changed as it is released. When the starches in the seeds changes into sugars by the enzymes that are active part of the germination process, those sugars give us 1 of the core ingredients for terrific beer. It is at that exact moment that the germination process is suspended using kilns to dry the grains and all of that terrific sugar and enzymes that became active remain in the malt for use during the brewing process.

Obviously this description of the basic malting process is simplified but for our purposes it gives you a background into what happens prior to you buy the malts you will use in your house made beer. But based on this description, you can go on to get a feel for the wide variety of malt types. The far more you know about malt, the far better informed you will be about what malts you wish to use when you brew your beer. And those decisions will have a big effect on the taste of your beer. So for good tasting beer, use fantastic malts and knowing 1 malt from the next is the key to knowing which to use for the greatest residence made beer possible from your house brewing efforts.