Randy Mosher joins me this week to discuss what different malts and grains bring to your home brewed beer. He gives us an amazing tour of the most popular malts used in home brewing and explains the flavors they really bring to the beer.
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Topics in This Week’s Episode (40:21)
- Randy Mosher from RadicalBrewing.com is my guest this week. Randy is the author of Radical Brewing, and Tasting beer (full disclosure: Amazon Affiliate Book links) and is also working a comprehensive new book on brewing.
- This week’s episode is sponsored by Craft Beer and Brewing Magazine – sign up today for your subscription!
- Randy tells us a bit about his new book “Mastering Homebrew” which will be released this fall.
- We discuss Randy’s overall approach to malt, malting and why color and flavor are not the same
- Randy talks about base malts and what they bring to the beer, as well as flavor malts, color malts and base malts.
- We start by discussing his base malt blocks including Pilsner, Pale malt, Munich and Vienna malts. He also explains why mild malt is a very attractive malt for many darker styles.
- We talk about cookie, bready, malty and other malt flavors
- Randy discusses adjunct malts. We next get into the light caramel/crystal malts like Carapils and dextrine malts, and how many caramel malts are very intense and potent in beers
- We walk through the range of Caramel malts and why darker caramel malts should not be used in barley wines and other long age beers, and also why very dark crystal malts should be used very sparingly since the flavor gets more intense and acrid
- We discuss why there are not many malts made in the range of 100-350L color, largely because they have a poor flavor (cigarette ash)
- He also explains why Chocolate malt really does not add a chocolate flavor – but has an acrid flavor to it if overused
- We discuss the use of Brown malts in historic porters as well as how porter has changed over the years
- Randy discusses color adjustment malts and how to use middle colored malts
- Finally we talk about adjuncts such as corn, rice, wheat and sugar adjuncts and what they bring to the beer
- We go into methods for understanding and knowing what your ingredients really taste like
- Randy shares his thoughts on SMASH (single malt) and dual malt beer brewing
- Randy tells us about his other upcoming book “A Beer for All Seasons”
Thanks to Randy Mosher for appearing on the show and also to you for listening!
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