remilard
Well-Known Member
Well its all highly modified unless it says it isn't. Go ahead and debate it...........its not 1989 anymore.
People seem to think that increasing degrees of modification of malt is inherently good and something recently allowed by technology. That is untrue in every way imaginable. The English have been making fully and over modified malt for a very, very long time. Domestic and Continental maltsters make malt that have varying degrees of modification, rarely overmodified (if more modification were good without question, it would all be overmodified).
The reason more and more malt is well modified or fully modified is not technology or discovering that to be superior, it is because continental breweries and american craft breweries want to save money by installing single infusion brew houses.
There are still step infusion and decoction brewhouses in the world and still malsters producing modestly modified malt for them.
So the question is, what does highly modified even mean? In the literature fully modified means the acrospire is 100% the length of the kernel, well modified is 50-99% (and at 50%, you are certainly step mashing) and undermodified and overmodified are the extremes. So if by highly you mean overmodified, no the vast majority of malt is not overmodified.