Malts

Malt is one of the four main ingredients in beer. It is the ingredient that is responsible for most of the flavor. Malt's sugars are fermented into alcohol. It comes in several forms; grain, dry extracts and liquid extracts. Malt is made by wetting grain and allowing it to germinate. During this process starches in the grain are converted into sugars that the yeast eats to produce alcohol. The grain is then dried and tumbled to remove the beginnings of roots from the germination. It is then heated to different temperatures to produce different styles of malt. Longer higher heat produces darker malts and shorter lower heat produces lighter malts.

History of Malting

Malt, has been used longer than recorded history. It is in the same form today as it was in ancient times. No one really knows malt's beginnings, and many legends surround this ambiguity. One of the most well known and excepted of these legends starts in ancient Egyptian times. Which involved using wells to produce malt from grain.

Enters, Floor Malting

The earliest known "malt house" was a simple structure located at the bottom of a hill or mountain adjacent to a stream, which could supply low temperature water by gravity. These houses had massive stone walls with floors of stone or mortar. Small windows set in these heavy walls were the only means of ventilation.

Barley would be dropped into water and then piled on the stone floor. Once the germination process began, which produces heat, it would be spread thinly on the floor to cool. The cooling of the germinating grain would stop germination.

At this point the germinating grain would be transfered to a kiln to be dried and roasted. The kilns of the time was a room with brick or tile floors with fires below heating them. In later versions the floor became perforated to allow gases from the fire to travel through the grain.

Because temperature controls were dependent on atmospheric conditions, malting at that time was confined to the cool months, which averaged about five months per year. During the rest of the year, the house was completely closed. Naturally, with this short production season, volume was very definitely limited.

Modern Malts

It was not until the advent of steam, and later electrical power, that any major change occurred in the malting process. With the advent of modern power, the first changes that occurred were the introduction of ventilating fans and water pumps. steel tanks were substituted for the old-fashioned cisterns, large fans were employed for ventilation, and adequate sprinkler systems installed. The next step was to the modern construction known as the compartment system. Here the steeped barley is deposited on perforated floors in a single bed through which moist cool air is drawn by fans to control temperatures as desired. Agitation is by means of large turning machines which periodically agitate and redistribute the malt.

The conveyor deposits it in the kiln house, which again has perforated metal floors through which hot air is drawn by other fans. In this case, however, the floors are sectional, so that they can be opened, and the malt dropped through.

Standard malts and specialty malts

There are two main categories of malt: standard and specialty. Standard (base or brewers) malts contain high amounts of enzymes, complex carbohydrates and sugars necessary for fermentation. Specialty malts are produced when the lengtime, temperature or humidity of the three stages of the malting process—steeping, germination and drying—are adjusted to develop unique flavors and colors, or distinctive functionality.

More intense heating decreases the amount of enzymes available for fermentation, so many specialty malts are designed to be used in smaller amounts to contribute unique flavors such as intense malty, sweet caramel, nutty, woody, coffee or burnt, and rich colors ranging from golden to red to black.

Handcrafting specialty malts differs from the basic malting process in that batch sizes are generally smaller, it is a much more labor and resource intensive process, it involves more laboratory testing for consistency, and it requires the constant vigilance of an experienced maltster who relies upon his senses of sight, taste, smell and touch to achieve the desired finished product from the beginning to the end of the process.