Mash ingredients
Mashing is the act of creating and extracting fermentable and non-fermentable sugars and flavor components from grain by steeping it in hot water, and then letting it rest at specific temperature ranges to activate naturally occurring enzymes in the grain that convert starches to sugars.
The sugars separate from the mash ingredients, and then yeast in the brewing process converts them to alcohol and other fermentation products.
For example, in beer-making, a simple pale ale might contain a single malted grain, while a complex porter may contain a dozen or more ingredients.
In addition, different ingredients carry other characteristics, not directly relating to the flavor, which may dictate some of the choices made in brewing: nitrogen content, diastatic power, color, modification, and conversion.
In Britain, preferred brewers' grains are often obtained from winter harvests and grown in low-nitrogen soil; in central Europe, no special changes are made for the grain-growing conditions and multi-step decoction mashing is favored instead.
Germination produces a number of enzymes, such as amylase, that can convert the starch naturally present in barley and other grains into sugar.
Diastatic power for a grain is measured in degrees Lintner (°Lintner or °L, although the latter can conflict with the symbol °L for Lovibond color); or in Europe by Windisch-Kolbach units (°WK).
Although with the huskless wheat being somewhat difficult to work with, this is usually used in conjunction with barley, or as an addition to add high diastatic power to a mash.
While SRM and ASBC originate in North America and EBC in Europe, all three systems can be found in use throughout the world; degrees Lovibond has fallen out of industry use but has remained in use in homebrewing circles as the easiest to implement without a spectrophotometer.
A grain that is not fully modified requires mashing in multiple steps rather than at simply one temperature as the starches must be de-branched before amylase can work on them.
Malted barley dried at a sufficiently low temperature contains enzymes such as amylase, which convert starch into sugar.
Therefore, sugars can be extracted from the barley's own starches simply by soaking the grain in water at a controlled temperature; this is mashing.
Dried at temperatures sufficiently low to preserve all the brewing enzymes in the grain, it is light in color and, today, the cheapest barley malt available due to mass production[citation needed].
Producing complex chocolate and cocoa flavours, it is used in porters and sweet stouts as well as dark mild ales.
In small quantities, black malt can also be used to darken beer to a desired color, sometimes as a substitute for caramel colour.
Acid malt lowers the mash pH and provides a rounder, fuller character to the beer, enhancing the flavor of Pilseners and other light lagers.
Roast barley is, after base malt, usually the most-used grain in stout beers, contributing the majority of the flavor and the characteristic dark-brown color; undertones of chocolate and coffee are common.
It provides the distinctive taste and clouded appearance in a witbier and the more complex carbohydrates needed for the wild yeast and bacteria that make a lambic.
Rye is also used in the Slavic kvass and Finnish sahti farmhouse styles, as readily available grains in eastern Europe.
As gluten-free grains, they have gained popularity in the Northern Hemisphere as base materials for beers suitable for people with Celiac disease.
In the US, rice and maize (corn) are often used by commercial breweries as a means of adding fermentable sugars to a beer cheaply, due to the ready availability and low price of the grains.
Maize is also the base grain in chicha and some cauim, as well as Bourbon whiskey and Tennessee Whiskey; while rice is the base grain of happoshu and various mostly Asian fermented beverages often referred to as "rice wines" such as sake and makgeolli; maize is also used as an ingredient in some Belgian beers such as Rodenbach to lighten the body.
Increased amounts of maize use over time led to the development of the American pale lager style.
Prior to a brew, rice and maize are cooked to allow the starch to gelatinize and thereby render it convertible.
Buckwheat and quinoa, while not cereal grasses (but are whole grains), both contain high levels of available starch and protein, while containing no gluten.
Therefore, some breweries use these plants in the production of beer suitable for people with Celiac disease, either alone or in combination with sorghum.
DME is prepared by mashing malt in the normal fashion, then concentrating and spray drying the resulting wort.
British brewing makes use of a wide variety of malts, with considerable stylistic freedom for the brewer to blend them.
The typical British brewer's malt is a well-modified, low-nitrogen barley grown in the east of England or southeast of Scotland.
The lower-temperature moistened kilning causes conversion and mashing to take place in the oven, resulting in a grain's starches becoming mostly or entirely converted to sugar before darkening.
