The Best Four Malt Measurements

The Master Brewers Association of the Americas has been doing podcasts and the recent ones on malt specifications have been fab. Four podcasts where a bloke rambles on about malt certificates of analysis, what's not to enjoy?

Here's my notes on The Best Four Malt Measurements:

Malting is about:

The Creation of enzymes

The partial digestion of structures

The many ways in which malts are analysed can be grouped into four bundles:

Bundle 1. Measure of protein modification

Have insoluble proteins been broken down into forms useful for brewing: for yeast food, for foam and body (and also haze). Must be enough protein modification to get to the beta glucan in the cell wall, otherwise beta gulcanase can't work. Good protein modification is the low beta glucan enabler.

• Total protein and soluble protein less important than the ratio (SNR).
• FAN (Free Amino Nitrogen)
• pH reduces during modification, so well modified malts pH 5.8 to 5.9. Poorly modified greater than 6
• Alpha amylase can be measured here as it's not as affected by kilning.
  
  

SNR is the most important

Bundle 2. Measure of carbohydrate modification

Has there been enough breakdown of endosperm and cell wall structure so is there recoverable extract and consistent attenuation.

• Extract measurement
• Fine coarse difference (obsolete now, and very small)
• Viscosity (close to beta glucan in value, but differences too small)
• Beta glucan (proteins have to be broken down before beta glucans can so it's the last major modification event in germination). Often less than 120, less than 140 should be fine though. 

Friability

Beta glucan is best indicator of carbohydrate modification

If both protein and carbohydrate modification are poor then poor extract, run off, haze, attenuation, and filtration. Over modification makes thinner beer with poor foam but over not as bad as under (like yeast pitching!).

Bundle 3. Measurement of enzyme potential

Protein breakdown should take place in the malting, and carbohydrate enzymes work in the mash tun but must survive kilning.

(Enzymes are more important for high adjunct lager)

As beta amylase is more sensitive to kilning DP (Diastatic Power) is the most important (though it will be in excess with all malt brews)

Bundle 4. Measures of colour and flavour

[doesn't go on about this, but presumably EBC (colour) and malt type – actually another podcast is to follow: no number describes flavour, it's kilning techniques. The numbers you have are EBC and moisture]

Friability: good analysis if you don't have a wet chemistry lab. A functional analysis of the whole malt system, instead of individual analysis of protein and carbohydrate modification. A comprehensive view of modification.

SNR and beta glucan are very variety dependent, so need to apply different values for different varieties.

European (German/UK) varieties have different values from US, as US historically had 6 row. So some need a higher SNR, there is no one correct SNR for all varieties. Brewers may think 38-40, or perhaps 42 is best, but some varieties may need 50. (People worry too much FAN means not enough foaming protein left).

Variety (or varietal blend) is important so the best SNR and beta glucan level can be assessed.

Good friability number with SNR defines good functionality of the malt.

Don't really need to know total protein unless you want to reduce it so you can control the amount of modification artefacts (i.e. too much soluble protein or FAN) e.g. no malt with barley over 11.5%. Or use a variety that converts less.

Need to look at extract, not because it indicates quality of the malt but so you can calculate yield.

Look at DP to check but really you should have enough, more necessary with a higher kilned base malt.

Kunze: In Germany (all malt two row brewing) 75 DP. This is ample!

USA DP two row 140

In Europe FAN is 140 on average

In USA is 220-240, so again unlikely to be a problem.

Adjunct brewers use standard pale base malt, craft brewers can us higher kilned base malts which might have 90 DP.

Don't worry about alpha amylase, unless you're an adjunct brewer. In Germany they don't even list alpha amylase on malt analysis as it's not a problem due to its abundance.

Least favourite analysis is growth counts. Important in management of process but means nothing in finished malt.

Passion proves no match for capitalism

Twitter has been all a flutter over the decision of Cloudwater, a well financed but loss making brewery, to stop selling its least profitable beers and focus on its most profitable beers. That it's cask beers getting the chop at the expense of keg and small pack has caused the kerfuffle.

The brewery was quite open about the financial reasoning behind their decision, though did throw in some minor cask beer denigrating for good measure. The large twitter response has in the main been people saying what they usually say, including those old favourites "We should pay more for beer" and "It's CAMRA's fault".

As I've a definite fondness for money in my own pocket rather than someone else's I've little time for the argument we should pay more. Those that feel they should be paying more can always send the brewery a donation, I'm sure they'll be happy to receive it.

As to blaming CAMRA, it seems just a little ludicrous to blame the Campaign for Real Ale for a brewery deciding to stop making real ale. The argument was tied in to the previous one, saying it's CAMRA fault that cask beer is too cheap.  I've seen little evidence of that myself, and cask beer has always been cheaper than industrial keg beer, let alone the pricey craft stuff. A situation I'm entirely happy with.

One point that was more interesting though was "What about the children?". If youths are drinking craft keg what will this do to the future of cask beer? Now I can see the concern here, but I'm sure youths drinking craft beer are more likely to drink cask ale at times than if they were drinking alcopops or keg lager. And as they get older they might well appreciate weaker and more balanced beers more anyway.


Though it is sad to see Cloudwater condemn their immortal souls to the fiery pit, let's face it, this side of libertarian communism you can't get away from the need to make money. In fact I've even recommended that people look into kegging myself. But I think we all know in our heart of hearts that cask beer is how god intended beer to be served. Or as Cloudwater put it when they announced they were going to stop making it: "Cask beer should take pride of place in every bar and pub".

Golden Pints 2016

After another year of only posting objective facts it's nice to once more an excuse to publish my own biased opinions.

1. Best UK Cask Beer:
   Thurstons Horsell Hop. Green hop beers are fab. And I helped pick the hops.
2. Best UK Keg Beer:
   I had one of these this year. Oh yes, though it was probably from a key keg so not really keg beer. In fact more cask in a kosher condom, as our mother church have given key kegs their approval. I didn't actually have the beer in the UK mind, but it was made in Britain: Gadd's Bretted IPA. Glorious it was.
3. Best UK Bottled Beer:
   Sticking with the Brett. here, Old Diary Tsar Top. Sadly it's not made anymore, but on the plus side I still have stocks of it.
4. Best UK Canned Beer:
   I seldom buy canned beer but I've been lucky enough to have some posted to me. I can't remember being blown away by any of them but I enjoyed Northern Monk Smokin' Bees Imperial Whisky Honey Smoked Porter so that.
5. Best Overseas Draught:
   The foreign draught beers that stick out this year are lagers, which just shows how open minded and cosmopolitan I am. I was delighted to finally find some decent lager in Germany, so thanks for the Franconia recommendation from (I think) Rob, but the winner was in Prague: Únětice 12°.
6. Best Overseas Bottled Beer:
   Orval again, still got a a bit of an obsession with this one and its bretty goodness. Drank a fair few bottles, and currently on my third go at making it myself. Which I really must blog about as I'm getting there.
7. Best Overseas Canned Beer:
   I did have a few tinnies on my travels but I can't recall for certain what any of them were. Forst lager was probably one so that.
8. Best collaboration brew:
   Can't think of one. And to be honest I still don't get the point.
9. Best Overall Beer:
   Thurstons Horsell Hop
10. Best Branding:
    Thurstons again. More excellent work from Too Much Black Coffee. I mean, just look at the Woking beer festival staff t-shirt:
    
    
    
11. Best UK Brewery: Thurstons
12. Best Overseas Brewery: Únětice
13. Best New Brewery Opening 2016:
    I like to let breweries bed in a bit before judging them so no award here.
14. Pub/Bar of the Year:
    The Crown, Horsell.
15. Best New Pub/Bar Opening 2016:
    Can't recall going to anywhere new this year.
16. Beer Festival of the Year:
    I was knacked at the GBBF this year so it wasn't a vintage one for me. Instead I'm going with Carnivale Brettanomyces. I did a talk there, and I've since written two articles about it for the IBD magazine. But most importantly I drank a lot of great beer with great people.
17. Supermarket of the Year:
    Booths again
18. Independent Retailer of the Year:
    Cobbett's Real Ale. I've been to any specialst beer shops often this year, but I must have been to Cobbett's more than any other, and I like their teeny tiny micropub.
19. Online Retailer of the Year:
    Not bought any beer online this year.
20. Best Beer Book or Magazine:
    I've been reading a lot of brewing text books of late, which has rather dampened my enthusiasm for reading other books on beer. Even my beer nerdery has its limits. I look forward to seeing Brewer and Distiller International each month though, so that wins.
21. Best Beer Blog or Website:
    Boak and Bailey have been as good as ever, but still insist on taking holidays at the same time so their regular flow is sometimes interupted. Ron Pattinson never stops though, after all obsessive is all 73 of his middle names. As well as his detail excavation of brewing records his accounts of wandering around getting pissed are also highly entertaining, so a well deserved win for Shut Up About Barclay Perkins.
22. Simon Johnson Award for Best Beer Twitterer:
    Pilot Brewery have come up with some corkers, and they're from Leith, much like myself, and went to Heriot-Watt, much like myself. Writing this I realised I don't actually follow them on twitter though, and have only seen retweeted stuff, so I can't choose them. The twatty beer doodles have been good, but did skirt dangerously close to heresy at one time, so not them either. You can't take any chances with your immortal soul. No, the clear winner for me this year is @brouwervanklomp (yes, I know).
23. Best Brewery Website/Social media:
    OK, Pilot can have this one, I really do need to follow them on twitter.
24. Bonus category
    Brewer of the year:
    I made a nomination for the BGBW award this year, but my man didn't win. So he's winning this one: Glenn Whatman of Old Dairy Brewery. He's won both SIBA and CAMRA national awards, so is already this year's winner so by any objective reckoning.

Box Steam Full Steam Ahead

Unexpectedly Box Steam Brewery sent me a bottle of their Full Steam Ahead. I'm always happy to be sent free beer, but this one was brewed to celebrate their tenth anniversary, and came in a big bottle at 10% ABV so I wasn't sure what to do with it. "Drink it" I hear you say, but when? Something like that is clearly best saved for a special occasion.

Christmas seemed like an ideal opportunity, but as it happens we didn't get round to it then. I'd got into the spirit of excess though, so polished it off on Boxing Day. Oak Aged it said, and I suspect it picked up some bugs during ageing, there was a touch of tartness to it. But in a good way, as it helped to balance a big beer that might otherwise have been cloying. It did remind me of those other aged beers, Liefman's Goudenband and Greene King's Suffolk Strong, and despite its strength I polished it off quick enough. Here's hoping that Box Steam have other significant anniversary's coming up soon.

The Story of the Whirlpool by H Ranulph Hudston

Not coming from an engineering background at times I find myself simply in awe of engineering innovations. Brewing engineering of course, I couldn't give a monkey's about steam engines or bridges or whatnot. In particular, the elegant simplicity of whirlpools strikes me as a true marvel: cloudy wort is pumped in tangentially, trub and hop debris settle in the middle, bright wort is run off. If I had to come up with a trub separation system I'd probably think of some filtration system that would get horribly clogged in a matter of seconds.

In fact prior to the invention of whirlpools settling tanks were used with work run off by a float pipe, as H Ranulph Hudston recounts in The Story of the Whirlpool*. Which just goes to show I'm no engineer. Hudston was inspired to invent the whirlpool by none less than Albert Einstein and a cup of tea:

"He observed that when he stirred his tea, the errant leaves in his cup immediately migrated to the centre where they settled, the larger leaves being in the middle of the pile. He pondered the phenomenon, decided why the leaves overcame the centrifugal force of the swirling liquid, and produced the mathematical picture of the forces exerted and currents produced in the teacup. No practical use was made of this readily observable phenomenon, at least in the brewing industry, until the year 1960, when it was introduced by the author into Molson's Brewery, Montreal."

Trub in wort

 Wort was fed into the settling tanks over an umbrella to aerate it. When the pipe was moved to the side of the tank to avoid it Hudston noticed that the trub was more compact and there was a small clear peripheral band around the bottom of the tank. Further adjustments were made so the incoming wort went in a circular path:

"The result was a definite heaping of the trub in the centre of the tank and the formation of a distinct wide band, clear of trub, around the bottom. On the next brew, the wort was drawn from this bare area through a conveniently located outlet at the edge of the bottom. The wort ran clear for the entire brew; therefore the use of the float pipe was abandoned."

The brewery were also using a centrifuge to clarify the wort, but trials showed that more wort was produced using the whirlpool, so it took over. Hudston gave a talk on the principles and use of the Whirlpool tank at a Master Brewers Association of the Americas convention in 1960, and their use quickly spread around the world.





* The Story of the Whirlpool. H.R. Hudston. MBAA TQ vol. 6, no. (3), 1969, pp. 164-167

The Pound pub

Something I've always wondered about the "umpteen pubs closing a week" stats is how many of them re-open? Though with most of the ones I know there's no going back The Stabbage in Woking has re-emerged as The Pound pub. Sounds rough, doesn't it?

But as with all drink related matters these things have to be investigated thoroughly so I popped in. 

The place was reasonable busy, with TV screens everywhere and a pool table. Much to my surprise they had two cask beers on, neither of which tasted of vinegar though they were lacking in condition. The cask beers weren't a pound a half either, but at £2.75 a pint were cheaper than the 'Spoons down the road.

They did have drinks going for a pound a pop though, including one branded as Friary Meux bizarrely enough. 

When I were a lad Allied Breweries branded their many local pubs as Friary Meux after the closed brewery in Guildford. Friary Meux bitter was their rather poor weaker cask ale, but the keg bitter was John Bull. And I'm sure that Friary Meux had gone before the dark lord Satan unleashed nitro-keg bitter upon the earth. So I guess that makes the Friary Meux Smooth Bitter a neo-retro brand. Weird, eh?

Free will and determinism

An old school friend I hadn't seen in 20 years recently tracked me down thanks to the blog. He was back in town and wondered if I fancied a pint. There was only one answer I could give to that question.

Since we last met I've become a professional brewer and he's now a keen homebrewer and is on the committee of SOBA. Was it free will that lead us both to make beer a big part of our lives? Or was it inevitable after we'd tasted Burton?