...or at least, some of my grain did.

I like a stout now and then, especially one home-made by myself. I have used Beerguevara's (BGV) Stout Kit a couple of times but I want to try my hand at designing my own recipe and, therefore, roasting my own grains would be needed.

So I go back into BGV and order a load of good old trusty 2-row grain, about 4kg milled and another 1kg unmilled, make sure I have all my other ingredients at home and then wait for a gap in the loadshedding to try a roasting.

I decide to follow Jason Johnson's guide "Roasted: A Homebrewer's Guide to Home Roasting Grain", partly because at the time it was a free download on Amazon.co.uk here, but also because it looked like a very simple guide to follow.

For some unknown reason, I decide to try roasting caramel malts first, rather than starting with dry roasting. No, I have no idea why. Don't ask. :-)

When I got out of bed on Tuesday morning, I checked to see if there would be loadshedding for the day and it looked like there wasn't, so I started off my experiment.

As per the instructions, I first soaked my grain for about 4hrs, which is a prerequisite for caramel malts.


Once that was done, I put the pan into the oven and upped the temperature of the oven a bit to start the mash process and set a timer so that I could stir the grain every 20mins to make sure that no hot spots developed and the temperature was more or less evenly distributed.



After the required 90mins mash, I removed the tray from the oven.

That was where the easy part ended.

Next I had to dry the grains, so I split them into two pans and stuck them back in the oven at a higher temperature (all temperatures had to be converted from Fahrenheit in the book to Celsius - come on USA, catch up to the rest of the world!!) and again, set a timer so that I could stir the grains to ensure a more or less even dehydration.

After an hour, I felt it wasn't going fast enough, so I took the pans out of the oven and left them in the direct sunlight. Capetonians might remember that Tuesday was a blisteringly hot day, so I used it to my advantage. And this went a lot quicker than the oven, as well as saved some prepaid electricity. It took about another hour and my grains were, to my inexperienced hand, about ready to be roasted.

Again, I fired up the oven to 200degC and put two pans of grains onto separate shelves. Within 20mins, the colour started changing, but I wanted darker roasts for these, so I left them in.

As you can see by the last photo, the pale malt grains in the photo are plain old 2-row with nothing done to them. The caramel malt grains were only caramelised and dried out, with no roasting time. The bottom two grains were roasts and after 30mins, I had a dark amber roast, while another 10mins gave me a dark copper roast. The taste and sweetness differences between them all is remarkable.



Roasting is a hands-on experience. You have to watch the oven like a hawk or risk over-roasting or burning your grains. My dark copper has a very toasty flavour, so I think I got those grains out just in time. Any longer and I probably would have had to toss them to the birds.

Would I do it again? Yes, it is an exciting part of the brewing experience. I learned some valuable lessons, so next time I will know what to do different.

Now I just need to set aside a day from woodworking to brew that Dubh Glas Stout. I will do one brew with cocoa powder and another without so that I can have a variety of flavours in the beer as well.

Slainthe!!!
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