Monday 18 July 2022

1953 DDR malt characteristics

For all you technical freaks, we get into the real meat of TGL 6841:1. With the specs of the different malts.

Don't you just love how well organised everything was in the DDR? Each type of beer and each type of malt had a legal definition. Perfect for keeping "innovative" brewers at bay.

This first table has some information about the appearance and flavour of the different types of malt. I'm surprised by how dark the Caramunich could be. Almost three-quarters of the way to Farb-Malz.And enormously darker than Munich malt.But all is not quite what it seems.

Two different colour scales are used in the table. Caramunich and Farb-Malz are on the Lintner scale, all the rest on Brandt. What the hell? All these obscure colour scales drive me nuts. I've some conversion from Brandt to EBC. But not for Lintner. If anyone has full conversions of these scales to something normal like EBC, I'd be very grateful.

The flavour descriptions are much as you would expect. But a bit heavy on negative rather than positive descriptions.

1953 DDR malt characteristics
malt  flavour Colour Appearance of grain interior
Wheat Malt  aromatic malt 0.20 to 0.35 pale
Kara-Münch malty not very bitter, burnt or predominantly bready 40 to 90 dark brown
Kara-Pils  0.70 to 1.50 golden brown
Farb-Malz not strongly bitter or burnt min. 140 dark brown, not black
Brüh malt aromatic malt min 2 golden brown
Munich Malt 0.80 to 1.20 light brown
Pilsner malt 0.16 to 0.26 pale
Vienna Malt 0.28 to 0.40
Source:
1953 TGL 6841:1 page 1.


2 comments:

E. James said...

Isn't Lintner a measure of diastatic power? °Lintner = (°WK + 16)/3.5. Or did Mr Lintner develop a scale for color too?

Ron Pattinson said...

E. James,

Mr. Lintner was clearly a busy man.