danw wrote:NCPaul wrote:Has anyone used the ProQ to smoke grain to be used in making beer? I may give this a try in the future and if there is a problem with this I'd rather avoid it.
A very late reply to this one....
I suspect that doing small amounts in a small smoker may work better than doing large amounts in a full size kiln.
Traditionally, rauchbeers (sp?) get their smoky taste from when the malted barley is dried. It is dried using a smoky fire and my assumption is that the moisture takes on some of the smoke flavour and that in turn is left when the moisture evaporates. Smoking it when it is dry means that there is little for the smoke to adhere too.
Some off my brew buddies tried to smoke their own malt using beech sawdust, without much success because the malt was dry. One guy got his malt too hot and got the runaway carbonization that maltsters sometimes experienced before the development of the patent roaster.
Malt houses were often two-storey buildings, with the malting occurring on the second floor, where the floorboards were spaced just far enough apart to allow a draft. Gervaise Markham describes his own malt house in detail. The goal was to keep the barley moist enough for sprouting without becoming so wet that it started to mold. A low fire on the ground floor helped strike that balance during the malting, when the grain was being raked. The goal of most maltsters was to keep the fire as smokeless as possible (straw with thin smoke and coals from very dry wood), but rauchmalt and peaty Scotch malt were made (whether by choice or necessity) by allowing the fire fuel to smoke through the several days of malting. Before development of the patent roaster, the damp malt was spread on the outside of large kilns to dry and stop the malting, and then roast to the desired degree. If they weren't careful a slow combustion of the starch would start and the malt would carbonize from the inside out, turning to charcoal. Once this carbonization started, it couldn't be stopped and the entire batch of malt might be lost. Still, the malt wasn't exposed to smoke during the kilning.
All that said, we did have one brewer in the club who was fairly successful at making a rauchmalt. He was a retired master brewer from Anheuser-Busch, and he did it by malting his own barley and smoking it the old way. It was a small batch, so he didn't have to get too elaborate, but I thought it was still far more dedicated than I could ever be...
Posted: Mon Sep 26, 2011 1:51 pm
