MdV: Merchant du Vin beer e-newsletter – Wednesday June 16, 2010: Specialty Malts & New Smith Rear Labels

Malty Beer: Specialty Malts

June 2010

What makes a beer "malty"?  Specialty Malts 
Last e-news we mentioned how winemaking seems straightforward: squeeze the grapes, ferment the juice.  Good grapes and no errors generally results in good wine. (Here is a link to last month's e-news, on mashing.)   Beermaking requires much skill and many decisions: barley is malted, then milled, then mashed.  The liquid portion is gently rinsed away from the husks, boiled, and seasoned with hops (in all their wondrous variety!)  Then comes cooling, fermentation, and conditioning: all these steps require decisions and result in different flavors . . . and we haven't even mentioned specialty malts yet.
 Beer is made from water and malted barley of some kind - pale malt, pilsner malt, six-row.  These sprouted barleycorns are packed with starch and with natural enzymes that will turn the starch into sugar; the sugar will eventually fuel the yeast, during fermentation.  (Craft beer gets its fermentable sugar from barley, wheat or rye; some specialty craft brewers also add fruit, honey or Belgian candi sugar. American light lagers use a percentage of rice or corn in addition to barley.)
 To add darker colors or roasty flavors, or caramel flavors, or biscuity flavors, or smoky flavors, or to change the body and mouthfeel of a beer, brewers often add some malt that has been handled differently from the base malt.  Often it has been heated, either under dry or wet conditions, and it is no longer "enzymatically active" - that means it will not convert from starch to sugar, and fuel the yeast.  It's there in the recipe only for flavor, body and color, and usually makes up less than 10% of the total malt bill.
 Here are some varieties of specialty grains and what they do for flavor & color:
 -Crystal Malt: pale malt is heated while wet, and the starch turns to sugar and then caramelizes, all within the barleycorn.  Crystal comes in varying degrees of darkness, but adds amber color and complex, sweetish, caramel notes to flavor.  Samuel Smith's Old Brewery Pale Ale has crystal malt to contribute deep caramel flavor & rich malt backbone.
 -Chocolate Malt: no chocolate here - this is malt that has been roasted dry, in a drum like coffee beans, until it is a deep brown color.  Used in porters, brown ales, and sometimes in other dark beers to give round, deep flavor notes that sometimes stop at nutty and don't reach roasty.  Also used in small amounts in amber ales and even some pale ales; Sam Smith's Nut Brown Ale is the classic example.
 -Black patent malt/roasted (unmalted) barley: Malted (or sometimes unmalted) barley roasted until black and charred.  In judicious amounts gives roasty flavor and dark color; in heavier amounts makes for opaque black beer and sharply roasted flavors: revisit your Samuel Smith's Imperial Stout. 
 -Peated, or Distiller's Malt: Malt kilned over a peat fire, leading to the smoky, spicy flavor found in some Scotch ales, and some American craft beers.  Used by distillers of Scotch whisky in their mash.
 -Smoked Malt: Malt smoked over wood.  In Germany, beechwood is used for "rauch malt;" in America brewers have used alder-, hickory-, and fruitwood-smoked malts.
 There are many varieties and versions of specialty grains; there are even malts kilned at higher temperatures (like Munich or Vienna malt) that blur the borders between base malt and specialty grain.  In their many varieties, in the precise ratio the brewer selected, specialty grains are one of the keys to the excellent beer in your glass.

Accolades, News & Events
Merchant du Vin's benchmark import beers continue to gain attention in the media:

Ayinger Brau-Weisse took the Bronze Medal at the 2010 North American Beer Awards, announced June 5, 2010. 

Sam Smith's Nut Brown Ale and Lindemans Kriek Lambic are both included in "Men's Health" magazine's "Best Beer and Food Parings" article from June '10.

We noted Sam Smith's Nut Brown Ale as the top English-style Brown Ale in the All About Beer magazine's July 2010 BTI Buying guide. Traquair House Ale tied for top Scottish Ale, amidst many other nice scores for our beers.  Sam Smith's Imperial Stout, Ayinger Brau-Weisse, Lindemans Faro and Zatec Dark Lager also appeared in this issue.

A full current news listing is always on our news page; you can also check local beer tastings, dinners and festivals on our national events page. If you are interested in beer glassware, clothing and collectables we also have an online e-store.

New, exciting, informative - LABELS!
Merchant du Vin and Samuel Smith's Old Brewery are proud to announce the introduction of something brand new from a very traditional brewery:
All-new, larger sized, detailed
Rear Labels!
 Small breweries generally don't run commercials on TV.  They don't sponsor national sporting events, or put their logos on race cars, or put up too many billboards by the freeway.  In fact, most consumers get their information about a beer from two sources:   they read the label, and they taste what is in the bottle.
Samuel Smith's has been brewing excellent beers for over 250 years.  Lots of folks know their beer benchmarks: Oatmeal Stout, which revitalized a dying style in 1980; Nut Brown Ale; Old Brewery Pale Ale, which has helped to bring the pale ale style to almost every craft brewery's portfolio; Taddy Porter; and the first winter season beer imported to the US, Winter Welcome Ale.  Those who have tasted the beer in a Samuel Smith's bottle have intimate knowledge about the brewery.
Soon those who have never had a Samuel Smith beer, or who haven't had one recently, will find TV commercials, race car logos, and billboards distilled into information-packed, illustrated 3" by 4" rear labels:  they are 60% larger than the previous style labels, and for the first time required US label elements take up less than 50% of the label area.
(Please note that the new style labels will be phased in as the old-style labels are depleted - they won't all show up at the same time.)   We've put a 2.4 MB .pdf that shows the new labels right here.

Lindemans Faro & Zatec Dark Update
 They are coming folks! If you haven't seen these beers, announced last month, keep checking with your local beer store . . . they are entering distribution rapidly, but it does take some time to get them out to retail. (Here is a .pdf of the Lindemans Faro news release from last month; here is the Zatec Dark release.)

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Until next month, cheers and thanks for enhancing your life with excellent beer - and a special thanks to our wholesale and retail partners.

merchantduvin.com

Merchant du Vin | 18200 Olympic Avenue S. | Tukwila | WA | 98188