Written by Breakthru Master Cicerone® Dave Kahle
We tend to focus on hop varieties when describing beer because hops provide impactful and recognizable flavors and aromas, they often have fun names, and are generally easier to understand than yeast strains and malt types.
However, talking only about hop flavors is equivalent to a chef only telling you about the spices in a dish when you don’t know the basis for the entree. As great as hops are as a subject, it’s important to look at all the ingredients in beer, namely malt, which is the foundation for any beer.
Malt is not only the sugar source necessary to make alcohol in beer, but it is where most of the color in beer comes from. Along with these two critical contributions, malt also gives a wide range of flavors to beer: bread, biscuit, toast, nutty, caramel, raisin, toffee, coffee, chocolate and ash to name a few. In this edition of Kahle’s Corner, I’ll discuss a type of malt, called chocolate malt, which is used in making darker styles, such as brown ale, dunkel, porter, stout, and even Scotch ale.
Malt for beer is primarily made from barley and wheat, but other grains can be malted like rye or oats. There are hundreds of malting barley varieties grown in the world and most would be suitable for becoming a type of malt, like chocolate malt. The type is less about the base grain variety and more about the malting process. To make malt, grains are coerced into germinating by steeping them in water to increase their moisture content, then air drying to supply necessary oxygen to the grain while venting off CO2. This steeping and drying cycle happens a few times over the course of a couple of days, after which the grains begin to sprout.
When the grains sprout they start to form enzymes which breakdown cell walls and carbohydrates into fermentable sugars. The carbohydrates in grains become the sugars needed to make beer, but for the grain’s purposes, these carbohydrates are their energy source to grow into a plant. Consequently, the maltster needs to halt germination when enzymes have formed, but the carbohydrate reserves have not been used up by the grain.
To stop the germination phase, malt is dried. This typically happens in a kiln or a roasting drum. Moisture content and PH of the grain, temperature of the kiln, and length of time exposed to heat all influence the color, flavor, texture, and functionality of finished malt. To make chocolate malt, finished pale malt is roasted in a drum roaster at temps from 419°F - 480°F for two to two and a half hours. This produces malt with a color that runs from brown to almost black. The name chocolate malt is said to refer to the color of the malt, more so than the flavors it contributes.
Ike Orcutt, owner and head brewer of Buckledown Brewing described the flavors this way, “Pale chocolate malt is probably more chocolatey, while dark chocolate malt is more like coffee or bakers chocolate.” He then said, “We use chocolate malts in all of our dark beers, be it a Stout or a Porter. It provides richness and great color without the burnt, roasted flavors of a black patent malt.”
Buckledown’s Shady Aftermath Porter gets both pale and dark chocolate malt, but only about 1.5 - 3% of the total malt bill. When asked about the importance of chocolate malt in a stout, Orcutt commented “We once made a stout without as much chocolate malt as we would’ve liked, and it came out like a dark brown ale instead. It wasn’t exactly what we were looking for. The chocolate malt is pretty critical.”