Making Brown Malt
Q: I’ve seen various recipes, mostly for porters, that call for the use of brown malt. I have had no luck finding it at any of the area homebrew shops and was wondering if I could approximate it by heating a batch of pale malt in the oven for a while. I guess that it shouldn’t be darker than chocolate malt, but just how dark should it be? Could I eliminate this dilemma altogether and use a chocolate malt in its place?
— Alan Berkheiser • Berkeley, California
A: Yes, you can make your own brown malt by roasting pale malt in the oven. You can also make chocolate malt and black patent malt by the same process. The difficulty in roasting your own malt is control, but it can be done if you are attentive and have a method to quickly cool the malt and prevent further darkening during cooling. Roasting temperatures for brown malt are 450° to 500° F.
The malt should be taken out of the oven when the right color is achieved and quickly spread on a cooling rack. Brown malt is lighter in color than chocolate malt and has a distinctive nutty, roasted flavor. The original brown malts were made by drying the “green” or un-kilned malt over a wood fire and had a smoky flavor to them. This method is no longer used to make brown malts, and today’s brown malts lack smokiness. Used in porters and other dark ales, brown malts impart flavors that would not be found if you simply replaced the brown malt with chocolate malt.
Before jumping into home roasting, I would recommend checking around a little bit longer for brown malt. I know of few malt houses that make brown malt, but Hugh-Baird and Beeston in England both have malts that could be classified as brown. Check around with your local homebrew supply shops to see if they can order malts from these companies or check with mail-order companies, which often carry obscure products that small shops find hard to justify keeping in stock. I personally like the flavor of brown malt in porter and stout and think that buying it would give you better results than trying to make it yourself.
