Lately I’ve been focusing on what I believe to be a very important concept… balance…
Most think of balance in brewing as a way to balance opposing characteristics as is the case of sweetness vs bitterness…
… but balance in brewing should be thought of as joining complimentary opposites, seen and unseen… that interact with each other as part of a greater whole…
The yin yang of brewing…
It’s not just two opposing forces… but multiple…
A beer doesn’t have to be sweet to be balanced against hop bitterness…
The malty flavor can step in and balance the hop bitterness instead when the beer is dry and not sweet…
All these factors must be coupled with other characteristics like the final pH of the beer, alcohol, tannins, etc…
You don’t just boost alcohol and expect everything else to play along…
You don’t just add dry hopping to a recipe and expect everything else to balance out… you may have to think of the complimentary opposite needed to balance that out…
It’s little details like these that take your brewing to the next level…
See, I used to think choosing malts was just a matter of learning what malt flavors to expect from them… this was after struggling to understand the difference between malts that needed to be mashed vs steeped…
I remember my early brewing days walking into my local home brew supply store and handing over my recipe to get grains… They looked at my recipe and ask something along the lines of “What kind of Pale malt do you want?”
I would reply with a 5 second ‘uhhhhh’ delay something like “What do you have?”…
They would then list off countries and a couple brands… and for a while I thought I should stick to American malts for American ales, English malts for English beers, and so on…
Keeping it simple…
But then I realized there were other components of malt I needed to look at and take into consideration even for single malt beers…
It’s the reason why Belgian brewers don’t just stick to one malt… even if they are using just pale or pilsner malt, they’ll use malts from various suppliers and from different countries…
They’ve found that seasonal variations in malts changes the amount of FAN (free amino nitrogen) produced when mashing…
Continental malts and North American malts have different levels of soluble protein, which produces FAN… North American malts tend to have higher levels of soluble protein and that produces more FAN when mashing…
Yeast forms protein from FAN… and they need to do so in order to grow during fermentation… but too much protein throws off the balance of other components…
… Belgian brewers use adjuncts… sugar, dark candi sugar, etc… and this reduces the amount of FAN… which is not bad per se, but not exactly good either…
… so they may use certain malts solely to boost FAN… but the problem with FAN is that it increases the final pH of the beer…
So Belgian brewers have to balance out that aspect when trying to nail down other components of their beer…
This is art my friend…
Cheers!
