- Brown Malt Development.jpg (12.19 KiB) Viewed 192554 times
Black Malt has been introduced (1817) and Pale Malt is now the main malt constituent in beer (following developments in malt kiln designs and the fuels to feed them, like coke from 1650-ish onwards). The "Brown Malt", once the primary base malt in beer has split in to the lighter "Amber" coloured malts and the darker "Brown" coloured malts for Porter beers. The older ubiquitous, diastatic, "Brown Malt" becomes extinct as more economical "Pale Malts" replace it. Brown Malts must become more flavoursome and colour intense to continue to supply the colour and flavour to beer ("Porter") that is still expected despite the smaller quantity used. In this process of intensifying the colour and flavours the malt would likely become "non-diastatic", but then it is the Pale Malt providing all the diastatic enzymes.
Kilns continued to develop and be used to create different malts, and at the same time "Porter" continued to recede in popularity, until eventually the old-style Brown and Amber Malts became utterly extinct. This would have been hastened by the fire risk created by attempting to make these darker malts more flavoursome. The new malt kilns could replace the old-style amber and brown malts with newer, more uniformly coloured, malts, but in doing so the "modern" brown and amber malts lost many of the features of the older malts. But as Porter and the like had lost its popularity the loss was "accepted".
There were two different approaches to producing diastatically active malt: Slow careful drying of the "green" malt before adding some colour and flavour with more heat at the end. And fast (cheap and cheerful?) drying of the "green" malt such that the main bulk of malt stayed below the temperature that destroyed diastatic enzymes. Enzymes were most likely to be destroyed by elevated temperature if damp. Fast drying would scorch some of the malt such that it would appear "brown". And would denature some starch such that the resulting malt created less "extract" than the carefully handled stuff.
?) for those numerous unidentifiable propriety sugars, but not "Brewers Invert Sugar"!
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