Home roasting expert needed!

I've spent easily 2 grand on equipment in the past year. Another grand on ingredients. That's about 75 cases of craft beer at retail prices. (It is expensive here in PA so I counted it at $40/case.)

So yeah you're right I am saving since I produced about 200 cases but still I am not doing this to save money.

And you've never understood the mentality about not doing this to save money??? It was never a consideration of mine. I do it to be able to drink the best beer in the world. To outdo any producer out there. If I can't do better than anyone else brewing than why not just drink the beer of the best brewers?

Synovia said:

I've never understood this attitude.

We can make 5g of beer for about the same as a 6 pack of craft beer.

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Yeah you can now, but how much money did you sink into buying equipment at the start? Also, please god don't strike me down for saying this, but how much time have you invested into brewing when you could have been spending the time working and making $? I think at some point I maybe, just mayyybe, might break even, but once I do I'm going out and buying a brewery.

dontman said:

And you've never understood the mentality about not doing this to save money??? It was never a consideration of mine. I do it to be able to drink the best beer in the world. To outdo any producer out there. If I can't do better than anyone else brewing than why not just drink the beer of the best brewers?

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Sums it up right there. I LOVE it when I pull a pint of my own, drink it and think "that has got to be the best beer of its kind around"

By the way I've realized how uptardedly off track this thread has gotten...so anyone caramelize or roast any good grains lately?

brokenanchor said:

By the way I've realized how uptardedly off track this thread has gotten...so anyone caramelize or roast any good grains lately?

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Yes... me! :rockin: But I've enjoyed the off-trackedness of this thread! Dontman, I really appreciate your quest to produce the perfect English pint. I too find great pleasure in many of the simpler biers, I know that's an oxymoron. Point being I find it harder to craft a balanced non-watery 3.2% bier over a 6.5% bier. Bigger & more ingredients aren't always the best biers. Sometimes it's the simple balance of grain, hops, & clean yeast in a well made quaffable blonde! Enough of that already.

I started a homemade roast/crystal grain thread about 2 weeks ago which didn't get the attention of this thread, but I got the info I needed in the last post. As a service to my fellow bier geeks whom are interested in controlling or creating (depending on how you look at it, I've an art background so I say creating) their own specialty malts I post this link which is how I came upon this same process. Funny it's the exact same process, but I'm guessing a different source. It's short, concise, & accurate; save for the fact that they don't tell you to mist your grain when caramelizing after they've dried. http://www.barleypopmaker.info/Roasting.html Not to worry with it only saying Roasting, they cover caramel also.

I'll add a thanks to beretta for posting up some info in my thread seeking this good information, cheers too ya sir!

Btw I created homemade caramel malt & smoked malt on the same day!!! Woohoo gonna go in the same bier!

Schlante,
Phillip

Regarding the previous home roasting threads. I have followed all of them I have seen, and tried many of the methods in those threads. Most methods didn't yield the result I was hoping for. This is why I started a new one specifying how to recreate Special B.

As fate would have it, I lucked out, and Dontman's method was exactly what I had been looking for all this time.

There have been contributions also that have led to further explanation of this process. (soaking method, covering the pan during caramelisation) If and when any further valuable information comes to light, then I would like to re-write Dontman's first post to include that tried and tested info with pics (I would prefer if Dontman would do it himself, his gig and all that)

I feel that his method is so spot on that it needs to be documented to the best accuracy possible and placed somewhere on this site that it can be easily accessed for others. The wiki and a sticky maybe?

dontman said:

And you've never understood the mentality about not doing this to save money??? It was never a consideration of mine.

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No, I've never understood the argument that you don't save money.

I do it for the good beer, but I do save money. Craft brew at the store is $2+ a 12 oz bottle. Its $.20 a bottle at my house.

brokenanchor said:

Yeah you can now, but how much money did you sink into buying equipment at the start? Also, please god don't strike me down for saying this, but how much time have you invested into brewing when you could have been spending the time working and making $? .

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Equipment, maybe $800. As to the time, I brew on Sunday mornings. Usually while watching football/baseball. Theres absolutely no way I'm going to work during that time, so its not a relevant consideration.

Synovia said:

No, I've never understood the argument that you don't save money.

I do it for the good beer, but I do save money. Craft brew at the store is $2+ a 12 oz bottle. Its $.20 a bottle at my house.

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I do both. I can't afford to obsess on equipment, yet I still brew beer for a fraction of the cost of lesser beer.............However, I had to drink an awful lot of home brewed crap to get where I am today!

Synovia said:

No, I've never understood the argument that you don't save money.

I do it for the good beer, but I do save money. Craft brew at the store is $2+ a 12 oz bottle. Its $.20 a bottle at my house.

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I know, late reply, but this misses my point. I don't argue the fact that I don't save money. The fact is that I don't care one iota that I am saving an incremental few pennies per beer. This is in no way one of my motivators.

I just received a pm about this and thought I would post an update. I have just begun serving beers from my first batch that was brewed with entirely home roasted or crystalized grains.

I might be a little biased in my tastes here but I am loving this batch of beer. There is a quality to it that surpasses any of my prior bitters. And I won a blue ribbon for Best English Pale Ale with my ESB entry this past year.

If I ever use store bought crystal malts from here on out it will be because of poor planning on my part. It is just too important a part of the process now.

I have two more batches, an Ordinary Bitter, and a Stout, using only home roasted grains in fermenters now. I feel like a newbie waiting for these two to hit the taps. I also bought a new stout tap and am putting together a beer gas set up for the stout.

In the spirit of updates, today I bought a proper oven thermometer. The missus could not understand why. As I type she is baking me a steak and mushroom pie (Yum) She has had to turn the temp up 75F to hit the right temperature for where the pie actually sits!!

I also brewed my first brew with my new crystal malt last week, but I got accidentally hammered.....Missed the whirlfloc, and possibly mis timed the hops a tad. So I'll let that one sit longer in the fermenter and behave myself when I do another this Tuesday.

Laughing_Gnome_Invisible said:

but I got accidentally hammered.....

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worth repeating

wilserbrewer said:

worth repeating

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Definitely worth repeating, But I won't repeat it during the next brew day.

Mods please sticky this thread so we don't loose it. Please. I think the information is to valuable and way cool. Other wise I hope you like your living room pink.

I have an update.

Two weeks ago today I kegged my first batch done entirely with home roasted and crystal grains.

This is already an amazing beer. There is more crystal sweetness coming through than in my last batch of this ESB, which surprises me. This is also a caramel bomb. A little moreso than the style dictates but delicious none the less. I think is some room for this type of caramel maltiness in Scottish Ale in addition to the decoction caramel. I now know that I either have to adjust this crystal malt a little down or up the IBU to compensate for the additional sweetness coming it.

The roasted grain seems to have gotten lost in the MO and crystal. I think I will up the quantity so that there is some character from it in the finished product. LGI, you are going to be really happy with this special B.

Oh yeah, I am serving this with my new stout set up because, well, because I have my new stout setup and my stout won't be ready for about 5 weeks and something was going to get pushed through my stout setup even if it was rootbeer. I love it. Only problem is that my 20 oz pint glasses don't fit straight under the tap with the drip tray in place.

I am going to do a Vienna SMASH as my next brew and I am going to roast and crystalize some Vienna malt for the batch. I have high hopes for that as well since I have 55 lbs of Vienna and I have gotten so hooked on English ales that I haven't even cracked the bag open yet.

I picked up two pounds of Maris Otter today, I'm going to be attempting some crystal malts this week to brew next weekend.

gplutt said:

I picked up two pounds of Maris Otter today, I'm going to be attempting some crystal malts this week to brew next weekend.

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How'd it go?

Laughing_Gnome_Invisible said:

How'd it go?

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They taste AWESOME..out of the two pounds I bought, I think I may have eaten
about 1/2 a pound (you have to taste it to figure out how they are progressing, right?). I just mashed in on an esb using just the Maris Otter I crystallized, and straight up Maris Otter..bittering and flavor is EKG. I'm excited about this one.

I brought some of the malts in to my LHBS and the guy tasted them..suggested I bring a bottle in after its done..so I take that as a good sign.

brokenanchor said:

Just as a reference how long do you toast the grain for your biscuit? I usually do a couple pounds on a cookie sheet at 300*F for 60 minutes.

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Laughing_Gnome_Invisible said:

60 minutes at 350F turning rgularly......But I find that after today I gotta find out the real temp. My oven is a total liar!

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I did some more biscuit a couple of days ago. This time I used the oven thermo......Turns out that with the oven set at 350F I had actually been roasting at 300F all along!

I just did an interesting F#ck up!

I was trying the malt condition thing. I spritzed the entire grist with 2% water (By weight) before milling. It turned out my mill couldn't handle it, so I decided to dry the grain in the oven at a warm temp so that i could pass it through the mill.

Now, I had imagined that as the water was surely only in the husk it would be safe to dry this stuff at about 120F turning continuously without affecting anything but the husk.

I was wrong. My efficiency into the boiler dropped by 10%! Obviously I have slightly crystalized my entire grist.

I'm not asking for a fix, and I won't try one. In fact. I'm very much looking forward to seeing how this beer turns out. It may well be cloyingly sweet, but hell, I've drank plenty of mistakes before now!

I'll keep you posted if anything really interesting happens with this screw up.

What kind of mill do you have?

MacBruver said:

What kind of mill do you have?

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Corona style. I could have milled it by hand. I just couldn't retro fit it in time. From the little bit I did get done, the malt conditioning rocked!

Do you guys experienced with this have a preference for the base malt used for different crystal/toasted malts? Would you use the same base malt for a toasty/biscuity malt as you would a crystal malt?

Been watching this thread and already have pretty much eliminated store-bought Victory/Biscuit by home toasting (I used Maris Otter). Want to try making some crystal. Don't know if I'll try roasting though. The aroma of home-toasting is nice...for the first 8 hours or so. Dunno if I'd like roasted malt aroma for that long.

I wanted to post an additional update to this thread.

While I am really enjoying my ESB brewed with home made crystal there is an astringency (think tea-like tannin) that I attribute purely to using the malt too soon. I only waited 48 hours after roasting for this first use of the malt.

By contrast I just tapped an Ordinary a couple days back that used malt from the same batch of crystal but which was about 3 weeks aged and there is no hint of that astringency.

So even though I did say to wait two weeks before using the malt I did wonder whether I was being overly cautious. Turns out that I was not.

dontman said:

I wanted to post an additional update to this thread.

While I am really enjoying my ESB brewed with home made crystal there is an astringency (think tea-like tannin) that I attribute purely to using the malt too soon. I only waited 48 hours after roasting for this first use of the malt.

By contrast I just tapped an Ordinary a couple days back that used malt from the same batch of crystal but which was about 3 weeks aged and there is no hint of that astringency.

So even though I did say to wait two weeks before using the malt I did wonder whether I was being overly cautious. Turns out that I was not.

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I confirm that. Age all malts by leaving it at least two weeks in a brown paper bag. There is a definite difference, especially with the biscuit malts.

Good thread here guys.

So far home-roasting has been a fun adventure. I've been using a little color reference widget to get my roasts more consistant... someone mentioned keeping some commercial grains around for reference, this is a great idea. I just took it step further and made a widget with my foodsaver:
Divide a bag into 5 or 6 widths with the sealer and then use a funnel to fill them with the reference grains. It's like an unopened pack of Otter Pops, instead of Grape-cherry-lemon-lime, mine are labeled 20L, 50L, 150L, 250L, 500L

I just thought that might come in handy - sorry no pics.


- Mike

(Otter Pops, you ask? < http://www.zverina.com/2000/images/000603-otterpops.jpg > )

Rip said:

Good thread here guys.

So far home-roasting has been a fun adventure. I've been using a little color reference widget to get my roasts more consistant... someone mentioned keeping some commercial grains around for reference, this is a great idea. I just took it step further and made a widget with my foodsaver:
Divide a bag into 5 or 6 widths with the sealer and then use a funnel to fill them with the reference grains. It's like an unopened pack of Otter Pops, instead of Grape-cherry-lemon-lime, mine are labeled 20L, 50L, 150L, 250L, 500L

I just thought that might come in handy - sorry no pics.


- Mike

(Otter Pops, you ask? < http://www.zverina.com/2000/images/000603-otterpops.jpg > )

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Thats a good idea. After reading this whole thread for what is probably the third time, I think I am going to get into this. I make my own beer, why shouldn't I make my own crystal malts too!

Is it necessary to age the homemade crystal/toast/roast in paper bags? I made mine almost 2 months ago now and have had them and my home smoked malts all in plastic bags. Just curious if anyone's experienced problems with aging in plastic bags.

My homemade crystal is very dark and VERY awesome!!! We used it in a 'grain tea' presentation at the homebrew club so I brought some for people to taste. Everyone loved it, said it was super sweet a couple wanted to pour milk on it and call it cereal! Affirmation rocks!:rockin: Can't wait to brew with it, it does seem to be WAY WAY sweeter and a higher quality than it's commercial counterpart.

Schlante,
Phillip

When I was less organized and didn't leave enough time for aging I would leave the grains completely out in the open for a few days. It was better, but not ideal.

Now I measure the grain into 1# and 1/2# brown paper bags, leave it for two weeks and then put all the bags together in the foodsaver. That has been working for me.

HOLY COW! I decided to try my hand at making a very dark crystal and so followed the original recipe, with a significant change. I stewed the grains at 160-ish for three hours (with foil on the pan), but then after spreading the grains over two pans, I immediately cranked the oven to 350 for one hour. I then lowered it to 250 to dry, which took quite a while. The result is the sweetest (VERY raisiny), darkest crystal malt I've evern encountered. It's way darker than the Special B I have on hand. Since I wanted something darker than Special B, that's fine by me. I'm no expert, but I'd guess this stuff to be 200L+. I can't wait to mellow it out and give it a shot!

Wow, that sounds awesome. A lot of the really big belgian beers like rochefort 10 have those rasiny or plum flavors... I bet it'd be great for a clone of something like that.


How did you do 160 for three hours? does your oven go that low? Unfortunately mine only goes down to 170.

MacBruver said:

Wow, that sounds awesome. A lot of the really big belgian beers like rochefort 10 have those rasiny or plum flavors... I bet it'd be great for a clone of something like that.


How did you do 160 for three hours? does your oven go that low? Unfortunately mine only goes down to 170.

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Cheating! I had it on 170 for about 45 minutes, then turned it on and off for the remainder of the time. It's unscientific, but it obviously worked. Before going to 350, that stuff was sticky as hell.

Has anyone tried any other grains that aren't barley based? Millet? Buckwheat? Quinoa? Rice? I know people toast grains like that for color, but how about conversion of starches to sugars for a more crystal like grain? Would any of them work with an amlyse supplement?

Wow, there's some great info in this tread!

I got inspired, and yesterday I soaked about three pounds of Pale Malt (T.Fawcett Golden Promise) and today, while brewing, I've been following dontmans recipe on page one in this tread and created some amzing smells and some crystal malt that I think will be a keeper!!

I discovered that hhere are huge differences between oven setting temperatures and actual temperatures, but I think I was able to pull it off quite nice. The conversion part went along good, but my temps were a bit high when they were supposed to be around 220 to make the 10-20L stuff. When the grains were dry and crisp they were darker than that. I sprayed some water on them and continued for an hour or so at about 300 and ended up with this:

Thomas Fawcett Crystal Malt (150 EBC, 76SRM on the left and my own on the right:



I'm quite happy with the result!
Then I crushed 3 grams of each and added some hot water to check the colour and have a taste:



Mine's still on the right. Just a touch darker and it is sweeter!
Can't wait to brew with this, thank you so much dontman for that recipe!

Crap. I was planning on doing this tomorrow morning in about 10 hours. Do you think a 10-hour soak will be enough (instead of the recommended 24)?

Teacher said:

HOLY COW! I decided to try my hand at making a very dark crystal and so followed the original recipe, with a significant change. I stewed the grains at 160-ish for three hours (with foil on the pan), but then after spreading the grains over two pans, I immediately cranked the oven to 350 for one hour. I then lowered it to 250 to dry, which took quite a while. The result is the sweetest (VERY raisiny), darkest crystal malt I've evern encountered. It's way darker than the Special B I have on hand. Since I wanted something darker than Special B, that's fine by me. I'm no expert, but I'd guess this stuff to be 200L+. I can't wait to mellow it out and give it a shot!

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BELATED UPDATE: It took me a little while to get around to using this, and only now are the two beers I used it in ready to drink. This stuff tastes so good, but it's very strong. I made a honey porter with 4 ounces, and while I like the flavor, next time I'll try 2 ounces (I may wind up at 3 in the end). A little goes a long way! I call this stuff "midnight crystal."

I soaked 2 lbs. of Maris Otter for 24 hours, and it's currently in the oven. I used filtered, unchlorinated tap water, but I really don't care for the smell of the wetted malt in the oven. It kind of stinks!

Also, it's taking quite a while for this malt to get up to temperature. I'm hoping that I didn't screw things up somehow...

I have to say this thread has been very informative and entertaining as well. I myself have pondered the possibilty of home roasting my own crystal and roasted malts from my base malts, with the end result being equal to or possibly rival the best commercial malts out there (I think the latter has already been proven) I also searched the net for some Malt roasting info and came across this site http://www.murphyandson.co.uk/BrewingArticles/MaltingProcess.htm .

They explain the process for a well known Maltster, Thomas Fawcett & Sons. Deff some good reference material here, but take note of the very last paragraph on this page.
I am sure the information given is for large Malting operations but better safe than sorry. If roasting indoors Be Safe and make sure your home is well ventilated.

I'm (very) new to brewing, I've never bought any grain other than domestic 2-row. I roasted some yesterday using Mosher's guideline as reference. I am hoping you fine folks can help identify what type of roasted malt I've (roughly) produced?

Domestic 2-Row, dry roasted in the oven @ 350F for 30 minutes:

Laughing_Gnome_Invisible said:

When I was less organized and didn't leave enough time for aging I would leave the grains completely out in the open for a few days. It was better, but not ideal.

Now I measure the grain into 1# and 1/2# brown paper bags, leave it for two weeks and then put all the bags together in the foodsaver. That has been working for me.

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I roast coffee in a drum on the grill , have you tried that or read about it.. just saying"Stay strong and Brew on".. I am interested in this