Remember the other day we were discussing the blending employed by Guinness? In particular, the use of unfermented wort as primings, or "heading" as Faulkner called it. Well guess what? I've spotted Barclay Perkins doiung exactly the same thing. With SBS Stout. The one brewed on the 8th January 1929, to be precise. You can checke the brewing log entry to your right, if you don't believe me.
Though it wasn't the only form of primings. "Sweet" is, I believe, sugar-based primings. Note, too, the typical Barclay Perkins technique of throwing a bushel or two of roast barley into the copper. I wonder if anyone else does/did that? Be interested to know what effect it would have.
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for whatever it's worth: Guinness puts ALL of their roasted barley into the copper with the hops, according to their website. it doesn't say WHY, though…
I read in the classic beer style "Stout",(I don't remember the author sorry), that Guinness used this technique with roasted barley, finely milled, dumped in the copper. It was, it seems, more cost-efficient, since the color extraction must be better. I didn't tried it.
I've tried running patent malt through the food processor to obtain a coarse malt powder that I've then tossed into the boil kettle. I haven't done any comparative work, but it seems that more color can be extracted with less malt.
If I recall correctly, Kristen has also tried it and he says that it can also affect the flavor of the wort in a positive way. Perhaps he'll chime in.
Black malt and roast barley was invariably thrown into the copper. There is nothing in either to mash, so there is/ was no point in mashing it.
In more modern times, it suits the parti-gyling, common grist type of brewing whereby the only difference between the beers produced is what goes on the copper. Bearing in mind that the typical mash tun in traditional breweries will produce three copper charges at today's gravities. It is the hops employed in the copper, and the colouring (and gravity) that makes the major distinction between a brewer's range of beers.
In my earlier books, for the malt extract beers, I said that black malt, roast barley, and crystal malt could be chucked into the copper. This was fine until the book hit America, whereupon I got tons of mail from ill-informed Americans criticising the book along the grounds that the brewer will extract:
polyvynilpseudosciencesupercrap
by boiling these grains.
The hate mail was so overwhelming and wound me up so much that, in the latest book, I removed all reference to American customary units and made it a condition of contract that the book would not be actively marketed in America.
It hasn't stopped Amazon.com, who are apparently stocking it from the first of April. Fortunately, it is so outlandishly expensive that I doubt if many Americans will be buying it.
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