Malt:Candidly

[Ahern]

Firstly, In no way do I want to insult Breiss Malting. They're a great company to deal with. But here's the deal: My extractions are wild. They often differ by more than a half degree plato. This is a new development. My extractions were very consistent until early this spring. What do you all have to say about Breiss? Am I alone in noticing this?

[MattKSBC]

Is Briess your base malt?

I use quite a bit of Briess specialty malts and see very little variance, but havn't used their 2 or 6 row extensively. What have your COA's looked like from lot to lot?

[Ahern]

Matt:
Sorry for the late reply. Yes, it's the base malt. The COA's all look uniform. Even looking back over cataloged COA's, I see no great variation. Day to day brewing, Batch to Batch, is a different story. I've noticed a whole lot more grain dust in the bags recently. Also nary a 50 pound bag actually weighs 50 pounds. In the grand scheme of things none of this is a big deal, I'm just wondering if anyone else out there noticed a drop in quality.

Thanks

[Larry Horwitz]

Got a malt lab? Briess does...I'd look at your process before you point the finger at your malt guy....varying your lauter times by 15 mins could account for your extract difference...or boiling changes, or bad mill sittings, etc. etc. etc. I've used malt from all over the world and I can tell you that changes in my final product have WAAAAAAYY more to do with what happens in our faclity (other than issues directly related to the flavor of the malt) than anything the maltster does other than color.

[Michael Murphy]

Check your mill, I had the same problem caused by my flex auger, I finally found the reason made some changes new settings and I havent had any lautering problems as well as I have been over filling my fermenters. Now I have to readjust my recipes or get bigger tanks...

[Ahern]

Dear All:

I take it that the general consensus regarding this matter is that the Brewer has more to with the final product than the Maltster: point respectfully taken. I'll keep bearing down on all the maddening variables we try so hard to eliminate on my end. I hope that you're right, that I'll find what's causing the variation and fix it.
I guess that's just it. I (we probably) spend so much time eliminating variables that when I find a tough one that bugs me for weeks I get irritated. Believe me, coming to you guys is not my first line of defense for problems. It's like asking the opposing dodgeball team to take it easy on you.
If anyone out there thinks differently for the aforementioned consensus, that perhaps malt can vary batch to batch, please make yourself heard.

Hope you've all had a nice Thanksgiving.

[Brew49411]

I have had problems with Briess in the past as well. I do agree that the brewer has a lot to do with the outcome, but Briess's bags have been a few pounds short of 50 many times for me and the grain dust has also become more noticable on my end. Since then I have switched to Rahr and am very happy so far with their quality.

[gabewilson50]

Not quite sure how it got in there, but I found a big yellow corn kernel in my bag of 2-row from Briess. I imagine it had to have come from the packaging process? I don't remember ever seeing anything of the sort with any of the other brands I've dealt with. Wierd.

[Wes]

The corn kernel most likely came from the raw grain silo and would have been through the malting process. We had occasion to find a batch of German malt with the same issue - not good when corn is a banned import in Australia.

[ryanhorlacher]

We brew several times a day and have half a dozen brewers and for a while I was plagued by inconsistent gravities. The malt analyses never showed great variation so I started charting gravities and brewers. A few months into the data collection, what I've found is that for a given lot of malt, gravities will vary in a .002 point band of SG and that no individual brewers are more or less consistent than any others.

There were also oddball spikes or dips in gravities but those seemed to flatten out once we came up with routine procedures to keep our grain scale clean and clear of debris, and once all the brewers started having uniform lauter times.

One of our guys who's been around and seen a bit suggested that toward the end of the harvest year, maltsters may not be able to find the highest quality barley that they can right at harvest time, so they'll settle for less ideal barley and we'll see the difference in poorer and less consistent extraction.

The one parameter on the malt analysis that does seem to coincide with fluctuations in gravity is the size of the kernel. Smaller kernels tend to yield lower gravities.

This is all very informal evidence but I've found that keeping a log and charting changes helps to explain variations and keeps me from worrying about the variations that inevitably happen from day to day.

[Guest]

Anecdotal stuff, I know, but a former brew-chemicals supplier told me on a course once that some maltsters can be a bit wily sometimes, e.g. blending a batch of under- & over-modified malt & giving you the specs for a perfectly modified malt!

On another tack - a few years back I'd brewed perfectly happily on a simple infusion plant, with malt from one of the well-respected, more micro-oriented independent UK maltsters for a good while. A few years later, in my new place, they were good enough to give us a few brews worth of malt to test with, but oddly, in our swanky German-built lauter-plant it just wouldn't behave (slow & dirty run-off & stuck mash). We tried a few times, then stuck with our original supplier. (I now simple-infusion brew again, with few problems again using that original maltster)
cheers
Mike

[lhall]

Kernal size will affect your crush - try adjusting your mill setting to keep the crush consistent.