Newb Question - Brewing to style - Original malt use?
Having read through some portions and recipes on this forum there was a question popped up in my head.
There are many recipes around for beers that are supposed to fit into "classic" styles. Most of these recipes call for up 2 - 5 different malts to replicate the style. When this style was originally brewed, would it have been made from a single malt, or have brewers been mixing their malts for a few hundred years now? I would have thought that back in the day there would not have been as much choice in the variety of malt available and so the local beers and local styles would have been more based on the ingredients available from the local malthouse, and that the range of malt available from the local malthouse was probably not so big?
I guess it just seemed a little odd (backwards?) to me to try and recreate original classic beer styles using methods that were rather different to how these would have originally been made?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Greig McGill on
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Beer styles are an evolution, and they change. They have been observed, researched, documented, then evaluated against what is actually produced. They are defined by several organisations differently, mainly for use in judging competitions. I don't think there are many cases where somebody intends a beer style description or a recipe designed to produce an example of that style to be historically accurate. It's more "if you correctly brew this ESB recipe, you'll get something that most drinkers today would recognise as an ESB".
There are web sites, books, and recipes devoted to reproducing historical styles - some with a painstakingly detailed research background. That's a different thing from brewing to a modern style description which might have evolved from an old beer style.
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Permalink Reply by Andrew on
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I agree with Greig and think your never going to fully replecate an old beer because for one, we have never tasted it. As has been pointed out we can only go on descriptions from "beer critics" of old. The range of malt now is far better than it would have been but they still had choice a few hundred years ago, porter which uses different malts has been around for a good 300 years.
Plus, you might not want to drink a really typical old style beer, a lot of the stuff we make now as home brewers might be better quality than commercial brewers made then. Some would argue that's still the case!( just before people try to slip that one in there I'll beat you to it ;P)
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Permalink Reply by JR on
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Ray Danials' book Designing Great Beers: The Ultimate Guide to Brewing Classic Beer Styles does a pretty good job of describing a few classic beer styles, their origins, how they used to be made, ingredients, gravity etc.. how they tend to be made now commercially and how homebrewed NHC second round beers tend to be made. The homebrew data is a little old now being from the late 90's (I think)
Also, a full range of crystals, roasted and toasted malts can be made from the same crop of barley malt.
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