Seeing Red
Color is vitally important to the visual experience of enjoying a beer. The malt and grain bill in recipes also imparts flavor, aroma, and mouthfeel. Josh Weikert wants us all to stop for just a moment, dive a little deeper into the subject, and realize t
Make flavorful and diverse red, amber, or brown beers that you’ve always desired.
ALL BEER IS RED. Before you flip past this article, which was clearly written by a crazy and/or colorblind person, bear with me for just a moment. I don’t mean that all beers appear red, I’m saying that all beers are red. Have you ever wondered why all beers—even those brewed with exclusively pale malts—travel the same straight road down the SRM scale? It’s because the melanin that infuses brewing grains is actually a subtle rusty-red shade, and as its concentration increases, the perceived color passes from a washed-out pale yellow (which is really just a super-thinned-out orange) through its natural amber-copper shade on the way to an opaque mahogany. The color also increases in intensity in specific grains that have been heated, toasted, or roasted, all along the same color spectrum. So, thanks to grain, all beer is red. It’s in that spirit that we spend the next few pages considering how to use grain (with a subtle helping hand from other brewing ingredients) to make exactly the amber, red, or brown beers that your palate or the style guidelines dream of.
“Hoppy” doesn’t come close to describing all of the contributions and permutations added to beer through hops usage. Likewise, “malty” is an overused and not-remotely-specific term that too many brewers abuse. Malty doesn’t have to mean sweet. Malty isn’t mutually exclusive of crisp. Malty can be accentuated by hoppy (seriously!). As malt is one of the two biggest ingredient “levers” brewers have some influence over, it behooves us to think globally about grain, just as we do about hops. Style, process, and recipe give us both a target and the means to hit it, and the result is a flavor-diverse and stylistically accurate stable of amber-to-brown beers that all make intelligent and robust use of malts.
Crystal Clear
When we think of ways to produce red beers (a blanket term I’m going to use for all beers ranging from light amber to light brown), we nearly always think of additions of caramel or crystal malts and how they’re used. Before we get into usage, though, we need to clarify just what we’re talking about. What are caramel malts? Are they different from crystal malts? What do they add? How much can we use? When should we avoid them entirely?
To begin with, caramel and crystal malts are distinct products, but it may well be a distinction without a difference. All are grains that have been heated in a fashion that converts the starches inside them into sugars, which are then further developed into non-fermentable forms of sugar by the roasting and/or kilning process. Effectively, the difference between caramel/ crystal malts and your base grains is that they’ve been pre-converted to create sugars, but those sugars are not the type that your yeasts will chew down and ferment. In addition, the roasting/kilning process creates diverse flavors that are dependent (at least in part) on the degree to which the grains have been heated (as determined by that Lovibond scale identifier!).
So, what’s the difference between caramel malts and crystal malts? The same basic physics and chemistry apply (heat plus time equals sugar), but there is a difference in the mechanism used to heat them—kiln or roaster? Both caramel and crystal malts are, strictly speaking, caramel malts (since all have had sugars caramelized inside the grain), but crystal malts are specifically those created in a roaster rather than a kiln. The resulting grain is much more homogenous than caramel malts, which are technically a blend of crystal and non-crystal malts. The distinction matters in terms of flavor and recipe, but the difference is negligible when you consider the many other factors that play into the final flavor of the beer,
So, what’s the difference between caramel malts and crystal malts? The same basic physics and chemistry apply (heat plus time equals sugar), but there is a difference in the mechanism used to heat them—kiln or roaster? The distinction matters in terms of flavor and recipe, but the difference is negligible when you consider the many other factors that play into the final flavor of the beer, to say nothing of the differences in flavor you get from one maltster to the next for similar products! Rather than obsess over the difference, it’s probably more useful to devote your time to learning the general flavor characteristics at each Lovibond level and the particular flavors from specific products used on your system.
to say nothing of the differences in flavor you get from one maltster to the next for similar products! Rather than obsess over the difference, it’s probably more useful to devote your time to learning the general flavor characteristics at each Lovibond level and the particular flavors from specific products used on your system.
So, just what are these flavors? There’s a healthy predictability here that makes our lives as brewers just a little easier, but bear in mind that these may sit differently on your palate than they do on mine. Generally speaking, though:
Light caramel malts (about 20L) tend to add a noticeable sweetness to the beer, like thin caramel or agave syrup. Do not confuse these, incidentally, with toasted malts such as Victory or Melanoidin malt, which are kilned to the same roughly 20L range but do not contain converted sugars!
Medium caramel malts (40–65L) are the workhorses of caramel malt, and provide a stereotypical caramel flavor—but also noticeably less sweetness. At the higher end of the range, you should also begin to notice a richer burnt sugar or toffee flavor.
Dark/extra Dark caramel malts (75–150L) not only increase the savory, burnt sugar-like flavors of the lighter caramel malts, but also begin to add significant nutty, raisin, or even light-roasted flavors.
With specific flavor contribution information in hand, we can next turn to just how much of these malts we can use in our red beers. Some styles accommodate a greater percentage than others, but as a rule of thumb you should feature no more than 10 percent caramel malts in your grist. More than that can add an unpleasantly heavy or (if sweetness is added and not balanced) cloying sensation to your beer, whatever the style. This is a rule that begs to be tested, but in early renditions of any beer, use caramel malts sparingly—they were never designed to constitute more, and were, from the start, viewed as supplemental additions rather than starring players!
We should also, briefly, discuss roasted/ black malts in the context of producing red beers. Unlike in stouts, porters, and most other very dark styles, in red beers we don’t especially want the kind of obvious coffee-and-cocoa flavors that dark malts can impart. Instead, in red beers, we are letting black malts get a look in but then booting them out of the party before they overstay their welcome. Some are used for simple color correction—to make your red beer, well, red. Others are used to increase perceptions of bitterness or dryness as a counterbalance to caramel or ester or alcohol sweetness, such as when we add them to American Amber, or in Irish Red to create a crisper, dryer finish.
Knowing your tools and the broad parameters for their use is an important first step, and one which allows us to move on to building our red-beer recipes.
A Playground of Flavors
Landing as red beers do in the middle of the color spectrum, it should surprise no one that red beers come with a wide array of flavor profiles. Recipe construction and process, therefore, should be undertaken deliberately to help ensure we get the beer we want. One approach is to start with style, build from light to dark, and then consider contributions (or detractions) from the rest of the ingredients in play before moving on to process considerations.
We start with style because it provides us with a general target. Bock recipes differ from Oktoberfest recipes. Saisons feature different flavors than Scottish ales. Even if brewing “to style” isn’t your thing, you should begin with some general parameters. Dry or sweet? Heavy or light? How intense should the malt flavors be? Which flavors? Use the grist to create guardrails for yourself—with so many ways to end up at the right gravity and color, malt selection becomes critical. Let’s consider a Doppelbock. If we’re only thinking in terms of color and ABV, we may be tempted to start with a dose of Pilsner malt, then color with medium and dark crystals; doing so, though, will almost certainly yield a sweeter, heavier beer than we would want, so as a result many Doppelbock recipes are nearly 100 percent Munich malt. Nearly the opposite would be true for a Strong Scotch Ale, and still different approaches attach to Baltic Porter.
Once we have a target in mind, we can select specific malts. “Take dead aim,” as the late golfer Harvey Penick would say. I prefer to work light to dark. What I mean by that is that in building a recipe, my first question is, “Can I hit my style target and flavor profile using nothing except base grains?” If the answer is affirmative, then that’s what I stick with. Usually, that’s not the case, though—even the aforementioned Doppelbock gets a little shot of Melanoidin malt, just to be sure I get the broad bready character I’m hoping for! Working up from the base, though, encourages a strategic approach that
Once we have a target in mind, we can select specific malts. “Take dead aim,” as the late golfer Harvey Penick would say. I prefer to work light to dark. What I mean by that is that in building a recipe, my first question is, “Can I hit my style target and flavor profile using nothing except base grains?” If the answer is affirmative, then that’s what I stick with. Usually, that’s not the case, though. Working up from the base, though, encourages a strategic approach that makes it more likely you use your crystal and roasted malts judiciously and to some specific purpose, rather than assuming they’re necessary and deciding which to use or leave out, and in what quantities.
makes it more likely you use your crystal and roasted malts judiciously and to some specific purpose, rather than assuming they’re necessary and deciding which to use or leave out, and in what quantities.
Once we have the grist generally selected, we can turn to questions of balance. Are there grains that would accentuate the flavors we want? Curtail the flavors that might cause us trouble? It’s in a case like the Irish Red that the balancing act of red beers is best on display: most recipes call for a small dose of roasted malt to dry out the finish, but at the same time there should be little-to-no roasted flavor added. That’s a tough needle to thread, and I stumbled through at least six versions of my recipe before settling on a specific amount of chocolate rye malt to do the job. Likewise, my Altbier recipe features a much stronger roasted-malt presence than the Irish Red, simply because it also includes a lot of really rich dark caramel malts, so the roast needs to be larger to take up more of that slack and keep the beer from being too caramel-forward (the resulting flavor is a bit like eating tree bark, which sounds gross, but has resulted in a lot of medals for that recipe!). We can work the other direction as well, bumping up sweetness in, for example, a Red IPA (to balance the hops bitterness) or Southern English Brown (which requires a sweet impression).
Next, we turn to contributions to malt from our remaining ingredients. Some hops (Northern Brewer comes to mind) are heavy in caryophyllene, an oil that adds a woodsy flavor that can play as a malt flavor. Different yeasts seem to preserve and round-off malt flavors (Wyeast 2206, Bavarian Lager) whereas others favor crisper or sharper flavors (the classic WLP001). Water chemistry plays a role here, too, with a higher chloride level favoring richer malt flavors while higher sulfate makes them flintier. Depending on just which red beer you’re producing, these secondary flavor contributors can make or break your recipe!
Last, we can consider process factors. Mash temperature (at the higher and lower ends of the conversion range, though not so much in the middle) can create different impressions of both body and flavor, as the ratio of fermentable to non-fermentable sugars changes. Aim high for richer, fuller beer; go low for more-fermentable wort (within reason). Malt flavors can be developed in the kettle as well, either through the kettle caramelization popular in Scottish ales or simply through an extended boil time to develop color. Even fermentation practice can play a role, with warmer fermentation producing esters and phenols that can complement or amplify the flavor contributions of especially the darker caramel malts.
Don’t just make beer—make choices. Red beers put almost all flavors on the table.
A Tale of Two Spectra?
On the one hand, here, we’re talking about a spectrum situation. Beer color is undoubtedly a spectrum, from pale straw to jet-black, finding our red beers in the middle ground. This doesn’t mean, though, that flavor is a spectrum. When it comes to red beers, it decidedly is not.
In these styles, arguably more than any others, the choices a brewer makes really matter. Exclusive of the usual discussions of hops flavor and intensity, alcohol levels, and more, red beers give us the opportunity, leeway, and tools to really create the beer we want. Holding SRM, IBU, hopping, and even ABV constant, we can generate myriad distinct recipes and flavor profiles as our malt choices change. Who would have guessed that seeing red could make us so happy?