The first steps in making real ale: Cheers Physics

That’s Munich malt, which is quite a pale malt,
If you try some of that, again, quite a little bit sweet but
Obviously you can taste the real difference between those two.
They’ll get roasted to develop that colour and flavours.
Generally the darker the colour the greater in depth flavour they’ve got
Rik: So you’re talking more like your stouts with the darker grains?
Exactly. And it doesn’t take much to get a significantly darker colour into the beer
Rik: is it just a higher heat?
Just at a higher heat exactly.
So that’s a dark malt and obviously the other ones are a bit lighter
Rik: that’s really good
Most beers would use at least 80% of the pale malt, generally most beers use at least 90% of pale malt
Rik: but it’s how you mix and match?
How you mix and match the different malts to achieve different shades of colour
Rik: so when you’re designing a beer do you experiment? Do you just have a day where you’re like oh we’re just going to try some different variations?
Generally that’s where the science comes in, basically you can get, I guess, 90% of the way there with the science depending on how much alcohol we want
will determine how much malt we’ll need so that’s easily done. The malts also have a colour specification so we can actually determine how much colour we want
by using different proportions of malts so the science can get us pretty much there as well with that.
Rik: You’ve already got a good idea?
Yep, already got a good idea
So that will give us the sweetness if you like and the colour and that background flavour of malt.
And then from the hops we’re going to get the bitterness and some aromas and flavours from them.
Rik: the first step in the brewing process is to get the malted grain into the mash tun.
And the mash tun is a huge stainless steel tank filled with hot water about 72 to 73 degrees Celcius
As soon as that grain gets to into that hot water a reactions starts to occur and sugars are given off from the grain.
And different temperatures give different amounts of sugar.
Now the difficulty is maintaining a really constant temperature so the way they get it in there without the water cooling down is they
take the grain, put it in this container up here.
And they add a big long pipe going into the mash tun which is down there.
Now as the grains are going through the pipe into the mash tun, they also feed in hot, hotter water which is about 82-83 degrees which cools down when it
hits the grain to around 72 degrees so the whole thing is maintaining this constant temperature so that the right amount of sugars can be released.