Roast Your Own!

[HockeyBoy29]

In these times where your local home brew store may be closed or hard to get to, you might consider roasting your own to get some specialty malts. We have a bunch of base malt and decided to try our hand at roasting/toasting some on a cookie sheet in a 300°f convection oven for various times. After roasting, we crushed up a little of each grain and steeped in 150°f water to see the colors. These six samples represent unroasted, 15 minutes, 25 minutes, 35 minutes, 45 minutes, and 1 hour. All from the same base malt, and they all taste amazingly different.

 

[cmac62]

cool experiment. You could also mash some grain whole, then dry it and do the same thing to get your own crystal malt. Let us know how the beer tastes when brewing with these.

 

[HockeyBoy29]

Yes, we do intend to make some caramel/crystal malt this weekend - thanks!

 

[bkboiler]

Wow! This is awesome! I know this method is used sometimes for roasting coffee. Did you find that you got a relatively even roast across each grain and from grain to grain?

 

[HockeyBoy29]

Yeah, super even. I weighed out exactly 1.5 lbs of grain for each cookie sheet, and it was enough to cover the bottom, but no stirring needed. Next time I’ll take a picture sticking my finger into the tray, showing how shallow the grain was spread

 

[bracconiere]

usefull pictorial for me......(but your crush looks coarse, )

 

[HockeyBoy29]

The crush was a quick cursory blast in a spice grinder just for color. I also threw in a teaspoon of whole grains in each glass to chew on after they softened, just to see how they tasted. Ate several dry and crunchy , but wanted to see what they tasted like after a quasi-mash.

 

[bracconiere]

how different was the taste from a crystal malt? sounds like you're making different lovibond munich malt......

 

[bracconiere]

i'd want to try a 100% 35 or 45 minute beer....should still have the diastatic power to self convert......

 

[HockeyBoy29]

It wasn’t as sweet tasting as crystal malt; very toasty and crackery- still sweet on the lighter examples, but noticeably different as you went darker. One hour was not sweet, but had a real toast/cracker taste to it.

 

[bracconiere]

very toasty and crackery-

just my cup of tea, pun intended...for a 12 hours kiln what temp do you think would be close to 300f?

 

[cmac62]

I have to try this on my traeger, that will add some smoke to the mix.

 

[mashpaddled]

Eight or so years ago I took a batch worth of pale ale and roasted it to make several different types of specialty malts and then made a brown ale using the combination of what was close to pale malt, a medium crystal malt, brown malt, munich malt and black malt. All of the malts turned out fairly well except my attempt at crystal malt which did not get as sweet as I hoped. The beer turned out ok but rough around the edges. A fun experiment but one I never felt like repeating. This is different from what you are doing here though.

 

[TheMadKing]

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In these times where your local home brew store may be closed or hard to get to, you might consider roasting your own to get some specialty malts. We have a bunch of base malt and decided to try our hand at roasting/toasting some on a cookie sheet in a 300°f convection oven for various times. After roasting, we crushed up a little of each grain and steeped in 150°f water to see the colors. These six samples represent unroasted, 15 minutes, 25 minutes, 35 minutes, 45 minutes, and 1 hour. All from the same base malt, and they all taste amazingly different.

I just created another thread where I was asking about the loss of diastatic power from toasting malt. Did you happen to do an iodine test on each of these grains to see if they converted properly?