Black malt v. roasted barley

[jrugman]

Having successfully brewed two AG recipes, I am now interested in trying my hand at a porter or maybe a stout recipe. I notice that a number of the recipes call for roasted barley which I don't have to hand, but I do have some black malt. Can I substitute the black malt for the roasted barley and if so at what rate?

Would it make much difference to the final flavour?

Cheers,
John

[nobby]

Most Porters or Stouts use Chocolate Malt or roast Barley. But I cant find one that uses Black Malt.

[Barley Water]

I would not recommend swaping black malt for roasted barley because the tastes are somewhat different. I guess the easy way to describe that would be to say that roasted barley will give you a very distintive roasty/acid taste while black malt will be somewhat tamer although will be roasty. Roasted barley is the signature grain in stouts although you will sometimes find some in American examples of robust porter (however usually not in brown porter, they use brown malt in the better examples). I have a really good formulation for robust porter and it got alot better when I swapped out the roasted barley for chocolate malt in the original formulation.

I am a real big porter fan and although I like a good stout, if I had to pick between the two, I would go for porter every time. You might try to find a clone of Fuller's London Porter, a sublime beverage in my humble opinion. Making a passable example of a dry stout (or porters for that matter) is easy but making a great one requires tinkering with the formula to get it just right, great fun by the way.