More malt 1880 - 1914

I'm nowhere near done with all the types of malt. It was quite fun researching this. Or rather, adding to the research in my unpublished mega manuscript. Which I wrote around 15 years ago. It's proving dead handy for streamlining the background work.

It's not just the information I've already extracted. Pointing to books which have the material I'm looking is also dead handy. It's saved to so much time.

Here are the last of the base malts.


PA malt
The classiest type of pale malt was called PA, or Pale Ale, malt. The name gives a hint to where it was intended to be employed: in the better class of Pale Ale. It was the palest in colour of the base malts. A final kilning heat of 180º F was recommended.

As a relatively expensive malt, its use was mostly restricted to the better class of Pale Ales, but it does sometimes pop up in other styles. The quality is reflected in the price. It was usually the most expensive.

High-dried malt
Another popular base malt, high-dried was, as the name implies, kilned at a higher temperature than pale malt.  It was finished at 200°-225° F.  The barley used was also of lower quality. The higher kilning meant that it was somewhat darker in colour than the other base malts. The colour being 15º upwards.

An enigmatic type of base malt was high-dried malt. Considering how recently it was regularly used – at least the mid-1960s ay brewers such as Truman – it’s amazing how completely it seems to have been forgotten.  The closest modern equivalents are either Simpson’s Imperial malt or Munich malt.

Its use was mostly in either Strong Ales or Mild Ales.

Amber malt
Similar to high-dried, but kilned at a higher temperature. Sometimes wood was added to the furnace at the end of the process. The higher temperature destroyed some, but not all, of the diastase.

“In the manufacture of amber malt the green malt is taken from the floor at the withering stage, and is loaded on the kiln at a depth of about 4 inches. The fuel used at the early stages of drying is the same as in ordinary malting; but when the malt is hand-dry, the heat is augmented and very dry beech-wood is thrown upon the fire, the products of combustion imparting the desired flavour.”

Rather than drying on a standard kiln, amber malt was sometimes drum roasted like black malt.  

It gave around 80 lbs of extract per quarter (336 lbs).