Making brown malt at home

[iBrau]

Hi folks. I recently wanted to make an old style brown ale which required Brown Malt in the grain bill. I had a bag of Ale malt on hand which I wanted to use up, so I did an experiment with roasting the grain in the oven. The malt browned very well and ended up with a taste of real deep biscuity roastiness! This is the malt used in my oatmeal ale named "Wholesome breakfast beer". Here's how I went about the roasting:

Making amber and brown malt at home by Vince Foley, 25th April 2014 I started with 1kg of whole-grain Ale malt from the Malting company of Ireland and stuck it in a roasting tin lined with tinfoil. Preheated the oven to 200C (domestic fan oven) and placed the tin on the middle oven shelf. After 15mins I took out the tray and gave the grains a stir - particularly making sure that any grains at the edge of the tin were moved in to the centre. The grains at the edge of the tray had the darkest colour so they must have been getting the most heat. I took out a few grains and then placed the tin back in the oven. The few grains kept aside I sliced in half with a knife to see the colour of their insides. After 25mins in the oven I repeated the procedure above. Then again at 35mins and 45mins. After 45mins in the oven I judged that the grain was darkened enough so I took out the tin and switched off the oven. I left the grain in the tin and placed it out in a cold room to cool down. Over the next 2 days I stirred the grain every few hours to try and remove any scent of burned grain. After 2 days I transferred the grain to a clean saucepan and used it in my brew.

Starting grain
Clean white colour on all grains


After 15 minutes
Some grains have darkened


After 25 mins
Most grains have darkened, a few light grains remain


After 35 mins
All grains darkened, light brown colour. Can be used as Amber malt


After 45 mins
All grains darkened, medium brown colour. Can be used as Brown malt

[CARA]

Cool post, thanks for the pics and step by step. May take a stab at that this evening-jazz up the little bit of Bairds I have left

[Garry]

Nice write-up Vince  Bet there was a nice smell coming from the kitchen that night?

[Bazza]

+1

Very interesting indeed. Never realised the process could be so straightforward.

Cheers iBrau,

-Barry

[iBrau]

Haha yeah Garry there sure was. The whole house smelt of roasted malt for a few days afterwards. mmmmmm

-Vince / iBrau

[Garry]

A few days! Christ, I'd never get away with that. There isn't enough yankee candles in the house to cover that 

Off topic, I love the formatting of the post. Are you a BBCode nerd or did you use some other software to compose the post?

[johnrm]

Good post Vince

[Komodo021]

Nice one Vince.. great post

[Shanna]

A few days! Christ, I'd never get away with that. There isn't enough yankee candles in the house to cover that 

Off topic, I love the formatting of the post. Are you a BBCode nerd or did you use some other software to compose the post?

I made roasted barley from unmalted barley last year. After three hours in the oven it looked like charcoal and the  kitchen smelt like it had burnt down for about a week afterwards. Made a lovely stout though :-)

Shanna