Coopers Pushes Malt Quality

[Beerlust]

Hi guys.

 

Stumbled upon this completely by chance. From our humble little homebrewing positions, probably not major news, but I found it interesting just the same.

 

Coopers Push Malt Quality

 

Coopers appear to be putting a lot of time, effort, & support into malting barley research etc. locally here in SA/Australia. From memory the collaboration brew produced in conjunction with the Lobethal Bierhaus last year (Botanic Ale), used one or a number of these newly developed barley strains as part of the malt grist.

 

Our farmers need all the help they can get, so I like the general direction of where this appears to be headed.

 

Good stuff Coopers!

 

Cheers,

 

Lusty.

[porschemad911]

Coopers is the largest remaining Australian-owned brewery and last financial year produced a record 75.3 million litres of beer.

Honestly I'm really glad that Coopers are doing well. I think they are an ethical company that produces great products and I am always happy to support them with my $. I'm especially happy to see them working with malting companies and growers to get a better product.

 

I think in the long term it will help us homebrewers, especially if Joe White Maltings is involved as the are one of the malts that my LHBS stock.

[LeonardC2]

Sounds interesting. After writing books on home brewing, researching old beer styles & the like, the one thing I'd like to see is some malts more like they had in the 17th through 19th centuries. It's tough enough coming up with modern recipe counterparts of old/rare/extinct beer styles with nothing more to go on than a description. But the malts were processed a bit differently back then. Like being dried over fires of wood, straw, or both, with straw dried being the preferred end result at the time.

So some old school malts returning would be really cool.

[Beerlust]

Hi LeonardC2.

 

Given the high quality & range of malted grains available to brewers today, I can't see any benefit in returning to older 'dated' methods for producing grains suitable for brewing. From what I have read, there was a lot of 'hit & miss' in the methods adopted way back then, & the quality of these grains was certainly not of the highest order in the majority of cases.

 

That said, I do understand authenticity & what is often required to produce it. With a little nouse & knowledge of the periods it would be possible to replicate how these grains were kilned/malted etc.

 

I'm sure you've done your fair share of reading & research in this area already so I won't insult your intelligence by offering anything from my end. For those who might be interested in this sort of thing though, looking into Belgian & German (particularly Belgian) brewing techniques through these periods (& earlier) will certainly give you plenty of food for thought.

 

Cheers,

 

Lusty.

[porschemad911]

If you intend to brew beers of a bygone era, then I would think that using the malting techniques of the time would be fairly important. To me, the interesting outcome of that exercise would be getting a sense of what people would have been drinking at the time. I'm sure the brewers at the time would have given their right arm to have today's malts though!

[Otto Von Blotto]

Neither can I to be honest Lusty. We have access to excellent quality malted barley these days, which makes creating consistently decent worts much easier than I imagine it would have been back 300 years ago.

 

In saying that, it would be cool if a malthouse did like a limited release every now and then of some type of malt produced using these older methods, because it would be interesting to see how a beer brewed with it would turn out.

 

But yeah, I can't see it happening or if it did being a regular product line. Breweries and home brewers alike ultimately want consistency with their malts to make recipe design easy and the resultant beers to come out as expected each time. I'm not sure this consistency of quality would be there using a method 300 years old that has been made obsolete by more modern, better methods.