Flaked barley

[RichardG]

Okay, I've moved to the experimental stage using extract brewing. I intend to do this for a while to get used to what the different grain and hop options do before I ultimately move to AG. Whilst at my LHBS yesterday I saw a packet of flaked barley. Now, I understand that this can be useful for aiding head retention and adding body to a brew. But I also understand that this needs to be mashed rather than steeped. Question is, what does that mean in practise for the extract brewer? As far as I can see it means soaking the barley for 1hr at 67degrees, rather than the 30 minutes I use for crystal etc. But there must be more to it than that; or is there? For example, I believe the water ph comes into play, but how important would that be to an extract brew? I appreciate that flaked barley probably isn't even necessary for the basic pale ale recipe I have in mind, but as I said at the beginning, this is all experimental and I want to get a feel for what all these different ingredients will do.

BTW, my intended brew is 3.2kg of Jon Bull Maris Otter extract (2 cans), 150g crystal, 40g challenger 6.5% AA boil for 60mins, 20g goldings 5% AA boil for 30mins, 20g goldings steep for 30mins. I believe that should give me some 35 IBUs.

[Bryggmester]

As far as I understand it if you are an extract brewer and want to incorporate flaked barley into your brew you will need to use DMS malt extract in the mash. This is not Dried Malt Extract but Diastatic Malt Extract. Edme used to produce this years ago before they stopped producing malt products for the home brew market, I am sure a call to Hope and Grape would establish whether or not you can still get hold of DMS. If you try to do a partial mash using ordinary malt extract then the starch in the flaked barley will not be converted to sugar and you will end up with problems, if you can't get hold of diastatic malt extract then leave out the flaked barley.

[RichardG]

Bryggmester, I salute you! I'm not sure if you can get diastatic extract or not but it's not what I've got now, so I won't get any flaked barley for now. Leave that to a later date when I've made the leap to the Dark Side. Cheers!

BTW, what about Irish Moss? I saw that in the LHBS as well, and I've seen it mentioned in various posts and recipes. Never really bothered finding out what it's for, but I guess I should now. Can you (or anyone) enlighten me?

[tomU]

Irish moss is a kettle fining - add it 15mins before the end of the boil and it coagulates proteins and clears your beer. You can also buy refined forms of this in tablets which are better IMO

[Parva]

The general concencus of opinion is that Whirlfloc or Protofloc tablets tend to work better than Irish Moss. The reason I say 'tablets' is that you can also buy Protofloc in powder form. The tablets are so much easier as it's just one tablet to each 23l brew, just chuck it in at 10-15 mins of the boil remaining and forget it. I personally use Whirlfloc and the clarity of the wort is superb though I do have some Protofloc in stock just in case I run out of Whirlfloc.