Crystal Malts

[ricshayne]

Sorry if the answer to this is posted somewhere else on this site, but I'm not really that good navigating the search feature.
My question is: is there a difference in sweetness or anything else between Crystal malts or is it just a color issue? For example if I'm brewing an IPA that I want to be slightly more on the orangish/reddish side of the spectrum if I use, let's say 0.5lbs of crystal60 will there be any difference besides the color as opposed to if I used 0.5lbs of crystal40 or 20?

 

[RonPopeil]

Crystal malts provide varying degrees of caramel and burnt sugar flavors. It's more than just color. The flavor spectrum ranges from honey and plain sweet through caramel, toffee, butterscotch and into burnt sugars, raisins, figs etc.

In your example, the darker crystals will give you more color but will also change flavor at .5lb per 5GA. If you only want a color change your best option is to use the darkest grain you can so it takes as little grain as possible to change the color without modifying flavor. This logic will also take you out of crystal malts and on to roasted malts like roasted barley, chocolate malt and black patent.

Your other option would be base malts and dextrine malts. Vienna is great in an IPA and will start you off a more golden brown than two row. Light Munich adds a bread crust kind of flavor which can work well and is darker than Veinna. Can make beers a deep ruby red. On it's own it comes out a brownish purple. Also biscuit/victory/special roast will all give you some color and add some bready maltiness to your beer.

If you're using brewing software you can measure you color in SRM and then cross reference with a chart.

 

[Yooper]

There is more information on the use of crystal malts in this thread: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/can-anyone-explain-crystal-malt-me-487211/ that should be very helpful!

 

[ricshayne]

Thanks you guys! These are exactly the type of answers I was hoping for!