What exactly is malt and why does it have a unique taste?
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Malting is a process where you soak a cereal grain in water to make it germinate, and then dry it with air to prevent it from growing any more. The process converts some of the starches in the grain into sugars.
Most commonly it’s done with barley, and making a beverage out of malted barley (which is called wort) is the first step in making beer.
You can also mix malted barley with wheat flour and evaporated milk to get something called malted milk, which is sweet and tangy and makes a good milkshake.
Malt is basically just sprouted grain. Grains like barley are just starchy plant seeds that when moistened and warmed (like a seed in the ground in the spring) will start to grow into a plant. Malting gets them to sprout just enough that much of the starch inside the seeds is transformed into sugars by the sprouting action (the seed can’t use the starch as is for energy, it needs to break it down into sugars first). Drying, baking, or roasting kills the seed and stops it from continuing to grow. What’s left is a sugar rich malt that can be fed to yeast to create beer or other things.
Grains like wheat, barley, and rye have a lot of starch, but not sugar. The grains themselves are seeds, of course. The starch is there to be an energy source for the baby plant before it manages to get some leaves into the sunlight. But to be used, it needs to be sugar. As the seed sprouts, it produces a chemical called amylase that acts as an enzyme. Basically, that’s a chemical that has a particular shape that lets it unzip other chemicals into smaller components. The starch breaks down into sugar. But it’s not sucrose(table sugar). It’s not fructose(the sugar in fruit and honey). It’s not glucose, which is what our bodies break other sugars down into for use. It’s maltose. That’s a major part of where the unique taste comes from. It’s a unique sugar molecule. It tastes sweet, but in a somewhat different way than sucrose or fructose. Think about the difference in taste between table sugar and honey.
When making beer, the yeast eats the maltose and lets out alcohol and CO2 as waste.
Can I piggyback on this?
Why does malted things make me feel unwell? Milo, Ovaltine, malted milkshake, Mars bars. All “nope, not for me”.
You soak cereal grain in water, the grains are like: “omg water, time to combine it with our sugar stock to be born and grow!” But then you’re like: “nope”, you let them dry and steal that, and that sugary taste is it.
This video by Adam Raguesa seems to cover most of what malt is and why it tastes the way it does.
Malt is grains that have begun the sprouting process. An important part.ofnthe sprouting process is converting the starch in the seed into easily useable sugar. An enzyme called amylase converts starches to sugars. Which the plant can then use as energy to grow before it has leaves and can do photosynthesis.
As humans we can exploit this by starting the sprouting process by putting grains in a dark damp environment. Then, as soon as they start sprouting we can dehydrate them (but NOT heat them) to stop the process without denaturing the enzymes. This is typically what brewers will buy. It is called malted grains.
Now malting, historically has almost always been in service of making alcohol. You turn grain into sugar that yeast can eat. The result is alcohol/beer. However during prohibition in the USA. Malters were not made illegal, but the use of their product was. So they came up with alternatives. They extracted the sugar from their malt. And you end up with malt sugar. Which has different tastes and characteristics to cane or corn sugar.
Malt became a popular food and candy additive during prohibition. Malted milk balls like Whoppers became popular. Malted milk shakes, that is, milk, cream, and malt sugar whipped into a frozen treat, became popular. Malt sodas were even a thing, but those died off. Finally there’s things like meal replacement drinks, like Horlicks and Ovaltine. Because malt sugar, like all sugar, is pretty high in calories.
Anyway, to this day malt is critical in the beer making process. And since prohibition it’s started being used in distilling mash bills. So it’s still important in the beer and liquor making world. Malted sweets have definitely seen a decline in popularity. But they’re still around.
Malt is where you take grain, hydrate it to begin germination, then arrest the germination through heat.
Seeds of grain contain a store of energy, as starch, and a little bit of the needed core to make new life. A seed needs to be stable and unattractive to things that might eat it, so it can find its way, first through wind, and then by waiting, until conditions are right for it to start to grow. It needs to be warm and have water. Starch is stable, so hard to digest, and that’s why it tastes bad. When the conditions are right, the little bit in the core produces enzymes, chemicals that convert the stable and hard to digest starch into sugar, that is easy to use, biologically. That makes it taste good (because our taste is designed to identify things that we can use for energy). This process of starting to come to life is called “germination”.
Of course the plant has evolved with the idea that this happens in the dirt, in the summer with some rain, where it won’t get eaten so easily. So we collect the seeds and deliberately create these conditions, artificially, to trigger this process. This is what malting is. We give them water, dark and warmth. This triggers the core of the seed to produce the enzymes that convert the starch (tastes bad) into sugar (tastes good). We don’t want to have that eaten up by the plant actually growing, though, so then we kill the plant after it has converted the starch to sugar, but before it actually converts the sugar into growing plant. What we do is boil the germinated seeds, that both kills the plant, and also causes the newly created sugars to get dissolved into the water.
We now have water with sugar dissolved in it. It also has other bits of plant dissolved in it too that adds some interesting flavours. We can then do other things with it, like add yeast in anaerobic conditions that will itself eat the sugars and grow, producing ethanol as a byproduct. In brewing terms, malt boiled in water is “wort”, and after the yeast does its thing is the beginnings of beer. We then need to kill and remove the yeast, and add other flavours, notably hops, to create the lovely drink of which I have a sample next to me just now.
Grain product, partially germinated then used for food or fermented, giving a different flavor .
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