Narziss' advice on Marzen

[Owenbräu]

Why not just use 100% munich malt, or blend vienna, munich and dark munich ? Seem the need for cara-malts is a necessity of using pilsner malt.

[Techbrau]

Caramalts are flavor bombs and an enormously important component of nearly every German beer style. The German breweries use them. Who else is buying up all of the wide range of caramalts made by Weyermann, Best Malz, etc? Nearly all of Weyermann's domestic sales in Germany are for specialty (caramel and roasted) malts. That's why they're called "Weyermann Specialty Malts." Their base malts are almost entirely for export.

The dogma that caramalts shouldn't be used in German beer is one of the many falsehoods preached in the American homebrewing and craft brewing community.

Experiment with some German style caramalts and you'll notice that they taste very different from US/UK crystal malts.

[Bryan R]

Tech beat me to it. Yup, even your lightest helles has caramalt in it.

[lhommedieu]

For Marzen I've used Weyermann's Floor-Malted Dark Pilsner and increased my boil times to 40/30/20.

Edit: the next time I'm going to increase boil times to: 60/40/40.

Somewhat off the subject, but since we're discussing Weyermann malts: Weyermann's floor malted are often touted as "slightly under-modified" but when I look at the spec sheets the Kolbach index is generally within the "well-modified" range. Are there other factors (kilning temperatures, perhaps) that would distiinguish their floor malted grains from their other base grains?

[Owenbräu]

Do the Germans break down color contribution by malt that can help guide percentages of malts to use? For example, on a 12 SRM marzen, how many SRM from base malt, Munich, dark Munich, cara-malts, etc.


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[Bryan R]

No, you use the %'s per the recommended in the first post, and that puts you in the SRM range.. if that makes sense.

[Owenbräu]

Understood. There are a zillion ways to arrive at a given color, depending on how much and how dark of a specialty malt you want to use. Just curious if the Germans had defined some recipe parameters for common styles. For example, on a 12 SRM Marzen, get 50-60% from the base malt (vienna or munich), 30-40% from caramalt (CMI, CMII, etc.) and 0-10% from roasted malts (carafa spIII, sinamar, etc.).

This would also allow you to infer whether german styles used pilsner, vienna or munich as their base. Take the marzen for example, if 8 SRM came from base malt, then you know they aren't using any (much) pilsner malt, and getting minor contributions from specialty malts. If they recommend 3 SRM from base malts, then you know its a pilsner beer with a lot of specialty malts.

Seems like the German brewers would have this kind of info researched and analyzed, but I don't read German (yet). At the same time, I suppose, recipe is the art and personal expression/preference part of brewing. Maybe we don't want recipes to be as rigid as brewhouse processes...

[Bryan R]

Narziss, goes into decent info on recipe formulations. The problem is they are just general guidelines.. To really get to the nuts and bolts you have to find a beer, say...Augustiner Festbier. Get the real color and work backwards, using those guidelines.

[Owenbräu]

My understanding is that classic German brewing knowledge says you are supposed to add hops after the hot break as it causes hop compounds to precipitate with the break material and reduces the utilization. I also know that FWH is very common in German brewing. How do you decide when to FWH and when to let the break form before adding hops?

[lhommedieu]

One take on FWH is that the hops reduce surface tension before the boil, thereby reducing the hot break and allowing the brewer to fill the boil pot with more wort.

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