This week on The Brülosophy Show, Martin explores the impact grain crush size has on beer by comparing a Helles Bock made with coarse milled grains to one where the grains were milled fine. Could blind tasters tell them apart? Watch now!
The Brülosophy Show: Coarse vs. Fine Grain Crush In A Helles Bock | exBEERiment
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3 thoughts on “The Brülosophy Show: Coarse vs. Fine Grain Crush In A Helles Bock | exBEERiment”
Interesting topic, but I prefer the written articles and don’t watch videos.
That a 5.9% beer tastes different from a 6.9% beer is not that surprising to me. Theoretically speaking the bitterness of the 6.9% beer might also be slightly lower due to hops being boiled in a higher gravity wort.
What is surprising: the attenuation difference observed? What would be the reason for this difference? Curious what your thoughts are on this.
Now I am wondering – would a fine crush vs coarse crush beer with a similar ABV be different from each other?
Seems that what this tells us, is that when it comes to taste, it’s the ammount of malt that matters, not the conversion efficiency. Taste is seemingly extracted much more easily than starch is gelatinized and converted to sugars.
If you are aiming for max conversion efficiency and at the same time for a defined ABV, you’ll get less taste than if you’re getting lower conversion efficiency but are aiming for the same ABV, because in the first case you would have to use less malt. Conclusion? One may use crush grade as a tool too achieve either a lighter or a more full-bodied version of a particular beer at a defined strength.
But I’m not sure the difference in ABV would be as big as in this exbeeriment if you had mashed at a lower temperature. At 67 C (152 F) the beta-amylase is denatured fairly quickly, whereas it would last fairly long at 63/64 C (145/147 F), and so the percentage of fermentable sugars would be more or less the same in both beers at the lower temperature. And then you could also compensate for the coarser crush by using more time, and probably end up with a smaller OG difference as well.