Can You Mix Crystal Malts to Average Them?

This may be a dumb question: can you mix two different Crystal malts to come up with an "averaged" Crystal malt?

For example, a recipe I'm looking at calls for 1 lb. of Crystal 75L.

The LHBS only has Crystal 60 and 90. Can I mix .5 lb of 60 with .5 lb of 90 to "average" 1 lb of Crystal 75?

Simply, no. It would not be the same. Color may be really close, but there's more to beer than color.

Simple is good. Thanks!

There will be people that are going to disagree with me though.

Uh oh. That sounds ominous!

Those people are wrong. You cannot simply average out for anything other than color. Crystal malts taste different depending on the depth of color; 10L tastes completely different than 120L tastes different than 60L. Can you fiddle with amounts of 10 and 120L until you arrive at 60L in color? Yeah. But the flavor will be completely different.

Practically speaking, I'd sub in 60L for the 75L and call it a day.

Bob

Bob is exactly right you can match the color more or less but not the flavor. I would sub for 60L as well if you can not get some 75L.

I'll second that statement and the guys at basicbrewing.com did a video podcast testing just that. http://media.libsyn.com/media/basicbrewing/bbv01-28-08specgrains.mp4

You guys are awesome. Thanks for the insight. I'll go with the 60L.

The recipe is for a brown ale, and I think I'm only losing MAYBE 2-3 SRM by dropping from 75/80L to 60L (from ~38 to ~35-36 I think). So, I'm not really worried about the color, I'm more interested in making sure the flavor profile isn't "off."