The Beerening: Beer 101 - Grain

Let's talk about Barley.  I'm serious.  I wanted this series to be basic and there is arguably no ingredient more basic and essential to beer than barley.  Barley is a cereal grain, and while any and all cereal grains can (and are) used to make beer, barley has become the most common for several reasons.

For most fermented drinks like wine or cider, fruits are pressed and their sugary juices are fermented.  Beer is more complicated, since beer is made from grain and grain is a simple seed with no sugary juice or meat like an apple.  So to turn barley's starches into sugars, we have to engage in a fair bit of trickery.  That trickery, and variability in that process is part of what lends beer its incredible variety.

In order to make beer from it, a simple grain like barley has to be malted, kilned, and mashed.  At each step along the way we can change things to have huge effects on the finished beer.  In addition to simple differences in the taste based on where the barley is grown, the way that it's kilned will change it drastically.

Kilning grains is a process very similar to roasting coffee, and just like coffee the more you roast the grains the less effective they are at actually making beer but the stronger roasty flavors they'll have.  Really heavily roasted coffee beans actually have far less caffeine than lighter roasts, so really heavily roasted barley has far less starch, protein, and enzymes.  You need starch to turn into sugar to make alcohol, so if you have no starch you can't have alcohol.  You need protein and starch to give beer body, so if you don't have both of those you can't have a thick, heavy beer.  Basically, this debunks the common myth that dark beers are always strong or always heavy.

Styles like stout and porter are built around lots of roasted barley, and from the roasted barley they gain their characteristic burnt flavors.  Porters, in my experience, tend to be more astringent and biting from the roast while stouts have tended to be smoother.  If you roast barley with the husk on it becomes bitter like coffee, but some brewers will use a malt called Carafa which gives the same flavor as heavily roasted barley with the astringency or bitterness because its husk has been removed prior to kilning.  For this reason Carafa is also called Debittered or Dehusked malt.  So if you see that on a beer you know you're in for smooth roastiness rather than robust bitter darkness.  Roasted barley also comes in "Chocolate" and "Coffee" variants, which indicate that the grains taste a lot like dark chocolate or actual coffee.

There are other styles that use smaller amounts of dark roasted malts to lend complexity.  Darker Scotch Ales and Wee Heavies spring to mind, but Irish Red ales will often use a little bit of the same type of roasted barley you'd find in an Irish Stout.  In these beers rather than lending bitterness or strong roast flavor, the dark malt increases the depth of the malt character and makes for a richer beer.  You can always tell that a beer has included a roasted malt of some sort if the head of the beer is an off-white or tan color.

Normally kilning is done while vented, meaning the water from the malting step has the ability to steam off and leaves the malt dry.  You could also close the vents, letting the grains stew for a time in a super-hot sauna.  This has the effect of converting the starches in the grains to sugars, which is normally done in the mashing step by the brewer rather than the person making the malt.  Then they're vented and dried.  This type of malt is called Crystal or Caramel malt and comes in degrees of darkness based on how long it was kilned, just like regular malt.  However because of the heat treatment of the sugars, they tend not to ferment as completely leaving more sweetness in the beer.  Caramel malts start with slight nutty flavor, then move into caramel and raisin-y sweetness as they get darker.  These malts are common in styles like English Bitter, again Scotch Ale and Wee Heavy, and also American and English Brown Ales.  Some more traditional IPAs or English IPAs will include a bit of Crystal malts, but the current trend in American IPA is to discourage their use in order to create a very dry beer.  Some people really dislike Crystal malts, but they tend to be a bit hard to avoid in medium colored beers.  However, German or Belgian beer styles are unlikely to include Crystal.


So that Myth busted, an some basic discussion of how barley's treatment and types affect a beer's flavor.