Golden promise

[beer gut]

Hi i have a question about the diffrences between Maris otter pale malt and the scottish pale malt called golden promise. I would like people's views on the taste diffrences with these malts caus iam brewing a scottish ale and iam trying to find out if you have got to use golden promise pale malt to realy get the athuentic scottish ale taste or can you use just maris otter and still get the same taste?iam also planning on taking this scotish ale to the compitions this year and iam worrying if the juges disqualify me for not using golden promise but on the other hand i don't want to buy golden promise for it to be the same as maris otter and for people not to care if i have or have not used scottish pale malt.

[Eadweard]

Golden promise was developed for making whisky with and not a huge amount of it is grown, so there aren't actually that many scottish beers made with it. You'll be fine with either.

[Rookie]

I use golden promise in scottish ales if I can easily find it, but I don't really think that there is enough of a difference to make a very big impact (if any) on the end result.

[jon_funk]

I bought 3kg of Golden promise a week or two ago, not realising it was a lot more expensive than the normal maris otter (This was just shy of £10 for the 3kg bag!) I only noticed when checking the receipt at home.

I brewed it up the other day and although my brew smelled fantastic the difference wasn't huge and may have been down to the added honey (bees, not honey malt) or the biscuit malt.
I won't decide wether its much better or not untill I've tasted the finished result, but if you can get it at the same price as your normal base malt (I think they're both the same price at Barleybottom) then why not give it a try.

Jon

[Bribie]

Golden Promise is the name of the barley variety which is then malted by a number of maltsters including Bairds and Thomas Fawcett of Castleford, Yorks. Not surprisingly it's the base malt of Timothy Taylor Landlord but I'm not sure if other brewers use it for beer, as posted above a lot of it goes to distilling. I use it for TTL clones (here in Aus we can get it at not much dearer than domestic malt prices) but TF put out other great malts such as their floor malted Maris Otter and Halcyon. Currently I'm using Halcyon in a couple of Irish Reds and I reckon if you could get hold of it, Halcyon would be great in Scottish Ales as well.