A ‘malty’ beer is not always a sweet beer… no way…

They don’t always finish with a high gravity either… it all depends on what you want and how you go about getting there…

With all grain brewing malty beers are brewed by mashing at higher temperatures… with extract you do it mostly by using specialty grains and low attenuating yeast…

But neither one of these methods will give you a sweeter beer…

When you mash at high temperatures what you are doing is creating complex sugars… long chained dextrins… and these sugars are not necessarily sweet…

They will give you a ‘maltier’ beer, but not necessarily a sweeter beer…

If you need to add a bit of sweetness to your beer to balance it out or just achieve a unique character, then you’ll need to leave simple sugars behind after fermentation… those are the sugars that provide most of the sweetness in your beer…

But the challenge here is that yeast LOVE simple sugars and they eat them up…

So if you want to leave more simple sugars behind then you need to figure out how much sugar the yeast will eat in the wort you are fermenting before you beer is done fermenting…

This is done with the ‘spoil your beer’ technique… where you take a sample of your wort and ferment it separately with conditions that speed up fermentation (higher pitch rate, higher temperature, etc.) and find out how much the yeast will attenuate…

By figuring out what your finishing gravity will be, you can monitor your fermentation and crash cool it to stop it before it reaches it’s final gravity… that will leave more simple sugars behind and give your beer a different character…

When you understand sugars and how to get the right sugar profile in your wort, you are able to better customize your beers to brew better and unique styles…

If you don’t understand how sugars work, you’ll be left wondering why your beers aren’t quite balanced…

That’s why I included a whole chapter on the topic inside my training program “Better Home Brew Formula“… check it out and learn how to brew beer…