The driving reason why I split my "historical" shenanigans about the mid-19th century (i.e. with this "late 19th Century and 20th Century" thread) was the dramatic changes to UK beer taking place at that time. The old "brown beer" brewing methods had reached their peak with "Porter" and were giving way to lighter beers. The most popular being "X-Ale" or "Mild Ales" (they were pale, even by WWII they were generally no darker than darkish amber). I wanted to capture and understand (better) the reasons for that without muddling it all up with the Porter years and earlier.
Certainly, more information available (like from Ron Pattinson's digging about in the brewery/library archives), more significant wars (humans were getting much better at killing each other), more taxes impacting beer (to pay for the wars), advances in creating malts for beer (the subject of this post!), more advances in creating sugars for beer (a major subject in this thread so far), ... any other reasons?
So. Malts. I'd started this in the "Ales and Beers (17th, 18th and a bit of 19th Century)" thread but it was wandering well outside the subject (time period) of that thread. A description concerning "Amber Malt" on Crisp's Website was causing me confusion (mainly by the way it referenced "roasting", "kilning" and "white malt"):
This is the palest malt made using a roasting technique. After conventional kilning, the malt is dry and pale in colour hence it is known as “white malt”. It is transferred to our Speciality Malt Plant and passes through the roasting column where the flavour is transformed through the application of heat. The temperatures used through the column determine the colour and flavour of the roasted malt.
This, I've concluded, isn't Crisp trying to redefine "kilning" and "roasting" of malt, but how they define the processes they use to create different malts. The more "normal" methods drying and kilning the diastatic "base" malts, such as in rotating cylinder kilns. And the quite different methods of creating coloured and "speciality" malts in "column" roasters. The malt is first prepared (dried and lightly kilned) to create a very pale malt which they describe as "white malt" before colouring it in roasting "columns". Of which "Amber Malt" is the lightest in colour (the roasters destroy all the enzymes too).
Other maltsters undoubtably use subtly different methods. It certainly clobbers the idea I still had that maltsters continue to use the "traditional" rotating kilns to produce "Black Malt" which is what they were designed for way back in 1817. More to the point, it drives a further wedge into to the difference between modern amber and brown malts and the old amber and brown malts (used before the 20th C.).
For "White Malt" (and "East India Malt", although I've never come across mention of it) I'll continue to take the recommendations in the Durden Park Beer Circle's booklet "Old British Beers ...", and use 50/50 Lager and Pale malts (or even the "Extra Pale" British malt varieties). Their descriptions of homemade amber and brown malts are surprisingly similar to the process described by Crisp. I still don't see the "Brown Malt" instructions being of value for 19th C. and earlier recipes, but the "diastatic amber malt" instructions should fit okay for this:
Let's Brew 1867 Reid Export Treble Stout (that's an interesting recipe with 57% Diastatic Amber Malt!).
Anyway, enough conjecture for a Monday morning. I'm off out in this spring sunshine.
[EDIT: The "East India Malt" (aka, in the booklet, "white malt") is described as EBC 4.0. Hence a 50/50 (1:1) mix of lager (EBC 3.0) and pale malts (EBC 5.0). But all the pale malts I use are EBC 6.5. May need some adjustment to the proportions? But I've suggested using "extra light pale" at EBC 3.5 as a direct substitute; they wouldn't have had access to "extra light" in the 1970s.]
