Home Toast Your Own Malt to Combat the Madness

Madness, I tell you! Sheer madness! Specialty grains, I've noticed, cast about a buck fifty to two bucks per pound. They are uniform. They are reliable. They are easily scale-able because of their uniformity. This is the route to madness. Where's the magic? Where's the touch of trickery and process mystery that can only happen from hands - human hands - touching small batches of grains and experimenting upon them for delicious beer? With my bulk bags of base malts, one of my plans for these huge sacks of grains involves messing around with them. Someday, I'd like to make my own caramel malts. Why not? John Palmer is convinced it can be done; ergo, I am convinced, too. I know I'd prefer to roast my own roasted barley and chocolate malt, because it can be done from home in exactly the amount needed per batch, utilizing these bulk-bought grains I have sitting in storage, which cost 35 bucks for 50 pounds.

And, more importantly, it is madness to create the same thing, the same way, every single time. It's a trivial pursuit of perfection, when most of the joy of life and cuisine comes from the surprise of the inevitable variation of each moment, ingredient, and process. McDonald's and their ilk pride themselves on uniformity, reproducible outcomes, and machine-like, chemical-laden "food" that is only praise-able, if anything, for it's ability to taste the same in rural China as it does in metro America and every where else in between. This is nothing to be proud of! That's something to be ashamed of, in food and in life! If you are living the same in China as you would in America, process by process, day and night, you are not leading the sort of life I would ever want to live, where my physical location matters not, and I have no connection to what is here, right in front of me, in this moment, variable and mutable and joyful and playful. To celebrate this idea of non-conformity even in the simplest of ingredients, and to celebrate my new all-grain system of brewing, I made one of the ingredients new, by creating my own specialty grain, in my own particular way.

Uniformity is madness.

Toasting malts, for me, was a celebration of the touch of magic that comes from doing things by hand, without the perfect tools, and still producing excellent results that will never, ever be exactly the same time and again.

For my first all-grain recipe, Golden Cloud Ale, I knew I wanted to take a basic Hefeweizen-style of beer to a level I could not achieve with mere extracts. I wanted to do something that had a human touch and a new process, for me, that would take my game to a new level of awesome.

Four ounces of Rahr Red Wheat, and four ounces of Rahr 2-Row were placed in a bowl of filtered water and covered for an hour, not long enough to thoroughly soak them through, but enough to create a lot of moisture in the husk and outer shell. More water meant more sweetness, and lighter-bodied wheat beers shouldn't be too weighed down by sweetness, in my opinion. Still, a little might be nice.

The soaked grains were drained and rinsed. Then, they were spread about an inch thick on a foil-covered baking sheet. The oven was running at 375 degrees to cook some potatoes. When we put the grains in, we turned down the heat to 350. I set the timer for one hour and fifteen minutes...

Ooh, and the house began to smell like good cereal. Like the kind of cereal you'd beg your mom for when you were a kid. I pulled it out occasionally to stir, and attempt to turn over the grains and move them around. I wasn't concerned about uniformity, but I was concerned about burning the bottom and under-toasting the top. The warm, bread-like, sweet smell was something marvelous. Then, I suspect the grains dried out because the smell turned acrid at about the forty-five minute mark. 

At this moment, I added more water straight to the pan, pouring it all over the grains, until the grains were all wet again. I stirred them up as the steam rose from the pan, and added a little more water. I put it back in to toast.

In the end, I pulled it out one last time, moments before my timer would go off.

The water added a sweetness to the acrid roast, but not an overwhelming one. The maillard reaction is the primary aroma, and at one hour and fifteen, it was right on the edge of burning. However, I placed them in a paper bag and let them rest for 24 hours. I still wanted some of the funky acrid-ness, but not too much, so I didn't wait a week, like it said in the book. I waited a day before grinding them up. I let them rest in a paper bag on the counter, quietly becoming my own specialty grains. How often can you find, in your homebrew shop, roasted barley and wheat together for the same level of toastiness and sweetness from both grains? Hooray for non-uniformity! Hooray for experimentation! Hooray for a DiY approach and breaking the rules!

Hooray for instructions from John Palmer's excellent book!

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We shall see if I produce good beer as a result. Next entry: Golden Cloud Ale Brewday.