What exactly is malt and why does it have a unique taste?
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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.
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