The Backbone Ingredient of Beer - What is Malt?

What do grains have to do with your pint? As you may or may not know, there are four main ingredients to beer - water, hops, yeast, and malt. But what is malt?  When we say malt we generally mean malted barley, but there can be other grains involved as well. The grains within that malt bill, which is the list of malts that a brewery decides to add to a beer, add not only colour, flavour and aroma, but they also add the fermentable sugars that yeast needs to be able to create alcohol and carbon dioxide. Malt is the backbone of your beer.  Let’s take a closer look at this vital beer ingredient

What is malt and how is it used?

When we say malt we generally mean barley. But you can also get malted wheat and oats. You can also have other grains that are unmalted, such as rye, spelt, corn, rice, or sorghum, which is a grain that's often used in African brewing. This can be malted or unmalted and unmalted grains don't add the same fermentable sugars. Grains that don't add fermentable sugars are considered adjuncts, but they can still be important in a beer recipe.

The mash - malted grains mixed with hot water, called liquor, to extract starches and enzymes

As a quick recap on how beer is brewed, the grain is steeped in hot water to extract starches and enzymes that produce the fermentable sugars needed to create alcohol and carbon dioxide. That sticky liquid is then called wort. It is boiled and hops and other ingredients are added to it. The wort is then cooled down and yeast is pitched into it. That then eats the sugars that are available and creates alcohol and our beloved beverage of beer. The more malt used in a recipe, the higher possibility of a high ABV. So if you've ever seen a DIPA and a TIPA and heard anybody say that it's the hops that are the alcohol, this is not correct. The alcohol is added by the fermentable sugars from the malt and yeast doing its job.

Malt categories used in beer

Base malts, left and specialty malts, right.

Malt is put into two different categories - base malts and specialty malts. Base malts make up the most of the grain bill - the list of grains that a brewer is going to use in their beer recipe. Base malts are lightly toasted and can produce more fermentable sugars. That's why they make up the majority of the grain bill. You then get specialty malts. These can be toasted, roasted, and stewed, and will add interesting colours and flavours to your beer. You only want a little bit of these to create aromas and flavours and it is the skill of the brewer that creates the interesting things that you drink from your glass.

The history of malt

When malts were first produced, the grains were put in sacks in rivers to start the germination process, they would then have to be dried over wood fires because that's all that was available. A lot of beers back in history would have had smoky notes to them. There also wasn't a high volume of malt that could be produced because the results were inconsistent. This all changed in 1818 however, when a man called Daniel Wheeler invented the drum roaster.  He'd seen how coffee was roasted and developed the same technology for malt. This allow for new malts to be created, much paler malts were possible and much darker ones as well. With new malts came new beer styles, and some of the beers that we enjoy today are due to this technological advance.

Technological advances in malting allowed for paler malts to be produced. This allowed for lighter beers and different flavours, like biscuit, to be added.

How is malt produced

But how is malt produced today? I'm going to refer to barley a lot in this section, but other grains can be used. Barley is harvested and then it's dried. The kernels are then soaked to start the germination process. This wakes up enzymes that we need to convert starches into fermentable sugars.  The barley kernels are then allowed to sprout but this is stopped by a process called kilning where the grains are heated and toasted to different levels.

Remember our base malts and our specialty malts - at this point, the maltster (isn't that a great name for a job!) knows exactly how much heat and air to apply to the grains and for how long to create different types of base and specialty malts. This process is called kilning and the colour of the grain may change. Kilning doesn't cook the grains, however, it just toasts them. If they were cooked, that will get rid of the starches that we need to produce fermentable sugars. At this point, the division between base malts and specialty malts comes in.

Dark malts are kilned for a very long time and are almost roasted, they can look like roasted coffee beans. A lot of the starches have therefore been killed off by this process, so they're not going to produce very many fermentable sugars. We want a mixture of these processes, however, to produce the greatest range of flavours and aromas that we can.

Cara or Caramel malts are produced in a slightly different way to our other grains.  The grains are stewed before they are kilned. This creates sugar crystals in the grains.  The sugar crystals then dissolve in the water when the mash is happening and add caramel flavours and colours to the beer being produced.

Why malt is so important in your beer

Malt is responsible for flavour, aroma and colour in our beer.

Malt is not only responsible for the alcohol levels, flavour and aroma, it's also responsible for the colour of your beer. Beer colour is measured on the SRM scale, which stands for the Standard Reference Method. This ranges from the lightest coloured beers - think about your very light pilsners - which are one to two on the SRM scale, all the way up to your darkest black Imperial Stouts, which are 40+ on the SRM scale. 

The grain bill is often the most complex part of the beer recipe. Brewers can use a single malt in their beer, or they can use a combination of as many as they like. I've heard 10 plus different malts mixed together to create what is in your glass. Really, brewing beer is an art as well as a science.

Spent grain after it is separated from the wort can be used as animal feed, in cooking or gardening.

As a beer lover, being able to describe malt flavours and aromas is going to be really useful to you. My free beer vocabulary cheat sheet has a list of words you can use when you are tasting beer to help you describe exactly what you are tasting.  Download the free vocabulary sheet here.