Post
by seymour » Mon May 19, 2014 9:38 pm
It's true: UK CaraMalt is relatively darker and sweeter than standard German Munich malt, which is partly why I prefer it. Munich malt is around 10L, CaraMalt is around 37L (just like CaraMunich, for that matter.)
I probably overstated it when I said CaraMalt is interchangeable with Munich malt. But I think "not the same at all, nor are they used in the same fashion" is overstating it too, in the other direction.
What I meant to say is: whenever a non-German recipe calls for Munich malt as a small percentage of the whole, for a lightly caramelized malt in the broad sense, I prefer to use UK CaraMalt instead (for its depth of colour and flavour, and its authentic UK-style sweetness*). In either case, the desired outcome is some residual caramelized sweetness/body/mouthfeel/melanoidin complexity not found in the pale malt alone. I'm talking about recipes for Pale Ales, APAs, IPAs, ESBs, amber ales, red ales, etc, where Munich so often represents 5-10% of the overall grainbill, in which case substituting CaraMalt would make itself known a bit more, but not a difference of night and day. In this context, there is more than enough diastatic power from the predominant pale malt, so it doesn't matter whether CaraMalt would convert itself or not.
Like I said, it's really a matter of personal preference. I don't particularly love Munich malt, and I tire of seeing it in recipes for every beer style under the sun. Generally speaking, I'd rather go intentionally lighter (CaraPils or Vienna) or intentionally darker (CaraMalt or CaraMunich). If nothing else, weaning yourself off Munich malt will distinguish you from the masses. That said, I admit I enjoy many beers containing Munich malt, including Stone Arrogant Bastard which is supposedly 100%. At such extreme percentages, you can/must compensate for all that Munich malt sweetness with a shed-load of hops. That's the American bigger-is-better, punch-the-drinker-in-the-face paradigm which eventually gets old, IMHO.
Going back to the OP, it sounds like your mystery malt might be neither Munich nor CaraMalt. Maybe it's just some other light crystal/caramelized malt, or maybe it was supposed to be a dark crystal malt, but the industrial-scale maltster still had something lighter in the chutes when they switched to bagging the next thing, in which case you might've gotten a weird cut of that transitional sack. Because we're dealing with such tiny sample-sizes, this sort of variability happens to homebrewers far more often than businesses want to admit.
*In case you haven't noticed, I'm on a personal mission to remind English brewers of their own proud heritage, to take pride in their own extraordinary English malts, English hops, English yeasts.
Pale malt + Munich malt + Cascade hops + American ale yeast = tasty beer, but that needn't be the formula for every ale brewed everywhere. You guys were brewing great ale centuries before we even came ashore.
But on the other hand, I can most certainly agree to disagree 
