Beer School · Ingredient
Malt
Malt is grain, usually barley, that has been steeped, germinated and dried. It provides the sugars that the yeast turns into alcohol, and gives your beer its colour, its malty flavour and part of its mouthfeel.
What is it?
What does it do in beer?
Types
Myth or fact?
Myth
‘Sugar in beer makes the beer sweet.’
Ordinary sugar is fermented almost completely by the yeast. It yields alcohol, not sweetness. Brewers actually use it to make a strong beer lighter and drier. Lactose is the exception.
Partly true
‘A malty beer is a sweet beer.’
Malty says something about flavour: bread, toast, caramel. Sweet says something about sugar that is left over. Many malty beers finish dry, and some beers seem sweet because they are low in bitterness.
Partly true
‘Corn and rice in beer are cheap filler.’
Price played a part, but it was not the only reason. In the 19th century, American brewers also used corn and rice to turn protein-rich barley into a clear, light beer.
Myth
‘Dark beer is heavier and stronger than blond beer.’
Colour is no measure of alcohol: beer gets dark from roasted or darkly kilned malt. A black Irish stout usually has less alcohol than a golden-yellow tripel.
Partly true
‘The Reinheitsgebot is a centuries-old guarantee of pure beer of good quality.’
The Bavarian decree of 1516 limited the raw materials to barley, hops and water, but it just as much regulated the price of beer. Yeast was not mentioned, and the name 'Reinheitsgebot' dates only from the 20th century.
A bit of history
How to taste it
Where it takes centre stage
More about what goes into beer
Terms
- Malt
- Grain, usually barley but for example also wheat, that has been steeped, germinated and dried so that sugars become available for the yeast; the more strongly the malt is roasted, the darker the beer.
- Kilning
- Drying germinated grain (green malt) with warm to ever hotter air, so that germination stops; for pale malt first at around 50–60 °C and then up to 80–85 °C. The hotter the malt is dried, the darker it generally becomes.
- Mashing
- Mixing crushed malt with hot water, often at around 65–68 °C, so that the enzymes from the malt convert the starch into sugars; at a lower temperature the beer becomes drier and lighter, at a higher one fuller.
- Wort
- The sweet sugar solution that arises from malt and water, is then boiled with hops and only becomes beer through fermentation.
- Original wort (stamwort)
- The wort before fermentation. The extract content of the original wort (in percent or degrees Plato) says how many dissolved substances, mainly sugars, it contains; it is not an alcohol percentage, but it is the legal measure for, among others, pils and bok in the Netherlands and for, among others, Bockbier in Germany.
- Base malt
- Lightly kilned malt, such as pilsner malt or pale ale malt, which has enough enzymes to convert its own starch and usually supplies most of the sugars in a beer.
- Caramel malt
- Specialty malt, also called crystal, whose starch has already been converted to sugar inside the kernel and which is then roasted; gives colour, body and notes of honey, caramel or toffee, and part of those sugars do not ferment.
- Roasted malt
- Malt roasted at a high temperature, such as chocolate malt and black malt (up to around 225 °C), for a dark colour and notes of chocolate or coffee; roasted barley is similar, but is not malted.
- Maillard reaction
- Browning reaction between sugars and amino acids when heated; in malt it is responsible for most of the colour and for malty, bready, toasty and biscuity flavours, like those you know from baking.
- EBC and SRM
- Two measurement scales for the colour of beer, the European (EBC) and the American (SRM): the higher the number, the darker the beer, and the EBC figure is roughly double the SRM figure (according to the Brewers Association, beer from 40 SRM, or about 80 EBC, is black).
- Adjunct
- An unmalted type of grain (such as corn, rice or unmalted wheat) or other fermentable raw material (such as sugar) that a brewer uses alongside malt, which can make a beer lighter in body.
- Candi sugar
- Sugar (sucrose) that has been caramelised light to dark; apart from some caramel notes (slightly more with the dark kind) it behaves, according to John Palmer, like ordinary sugar and ferments almost completely. According to Palmer, Belgian breweries mainly use the syrup form.
- Lactose
- Milk sugar that brewers add for a lasting sweetness, known from milk stout, and which falls under 'milk' in the EU allergen list.
- Residual sweetness
- Sugar that the yeast did not convert during fermentation and that therefore stays behind in the beer; lactose is a well-known example, because brewer's yeast does not ferment it.
Sources for this page
- John Palmer, How to Brew — Chapter 12: Understanding Malted Barley and Adjuncts
- John Palmer, How to Brew — Chapter 14: How the Mash Works
- John Palmer, How to Brew — Chapter 21: Developing Your Own Recipes
- D. Evan Evans, Wenbiao Shen en Peter A. Brookes (2024), Malting – 'the middle parts of fortune' – a history of innovation and the enduring quest for efficiency, Journal of the Institute of Brewing 130: 126–181
- Brewers Association 2026 Beer Style Guidelines, published by the Brewers Association
- BJCP 2021 Style Guidelines — 10A Weissbier
- BJCP 2021 Style Guidelines — 24A Witbier
- BJCP 2021 Style Guidelines — 6C Dunkles Bock
- BJCP 2021 Style Guidelines — 26B Belgian Dubbel
- BJCP 2021 Style Guidelines — 6B Rauchbier
- BJCP 2021 Style Guidelines — 16A Sweet Stout
- Montana State University, Barley Breeding Program — Malt Color Ranges
- Warenwetbesluit Gereserveerde aanduidingen, art. 7b en 7g (wetten.overheid.nl)
- Martyn Cornell, Zythophile — Burton: not the first place in the world to brew pale beers (2009, archiefkopie)
- Jeff Alworth, Beervana — 19th Century Porters (2011)
