Today a bad case of “Sherlock Holmes” sit and think about random stuff and come across an amazing discovery carried my entire day… really, it’s one of those times you occupy yourself in random stuff just to keep your sanity levels down…
I was curious to know why the heck did brewers start adding malt towards the last 20-30 minutes of the boil and not at the very beginning of the boil?
Doesn’t malt need to be cooked?
I think so…
In fact, I reminisced about my first couple of batches when I was nervous about missing a step and having my beer turn into sock water instead of the delicious craft beer I’d idealized in my mind…
One thing that caught my attention back then was trying to figure out why most recipes will have you boil only part of the brew and then dilute it with water to make up a full five gallon batch?
The answer to all these questions is that the amount of water you use in the boil affects your beer in a couple of ways. When you have less water in your wort and you boil it that way, the color of your beer turns out to be darker. Also, your beer will turn out less bitter if the concentration of sugars in the wort is high…
So, one of the reasons why brewers started adding malt towards the end of the boil was to reduce the amount of concentration of wort which kept beers at a lighter color and got better hop utilization times…
Now that sounds genius…
However, there is a little problem with that…
When you don’t boil malt long enough you start to get cooked vegetable flavors into your beer and I’m not sure that is a good trade off?
In fact, the only reason why a brewer would want to add malt at knock out (towards the end of the boil) is if they can’t boil a full 5 gallon batch… There is the case in which a more legit reason why a brewer will want to do this even if they are brewing a full 5 gallon batch is to add a little bit of DMS flavor to their beer since some actually require it…
Beers like Helles Bock will often times have DMS flavors from the pils malt and this is really the secret of adding malt at knock out…
Other than that, most brewers should get into the habit of brewing lower gravity worts…
Since most use electric stoves, the cap for boiling worts seems to be about 4 gallons although some do have powerful stoves that can easily take on a five gallon pot…
Carrying 5 gallons of hot boiling wort around your kitchen is not exactly safe which I guess is another reason why some people opt for higher gravity worts and would rather get a darker beer than to risk getting a 2nd degree burn from tripping while carrying their wort…
And yes, that has happened to some brewers…
Well I think I’ve satisfied my curiosity of knowing why late malt additions were invented and I’m off to take Jack (my dog) for a run…
