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The term "malt" refers to several products of the process:

• the grains to which this process has been applied, for example malted barley;
• the sugar, heavy in maltose, derived from such grains, such as the baker's malt used in various cereals; or
• a product based on malted milk, similar to a malted milkshake (i.e., "malts").

Whisky or beer made from malted barley or rye can also be called malt, as in Alfred Edward Housman's aphorism "malt does more than Milton can, to justify God's ways to Man."

Uses

Maltings

A maltings, sometimes called malthouse, or malting floor, is a building that houses the process of converting barley into malt, for use in the brewing or distilling process. This is done by kiln-drying the sprouted barley. This is usually done by spreading the sprouted barley on a perforated wooden floor. Smoke, coming from an oasting fireplace (via smoke channels) is then used to heat the wooden floor (and thus, the sprouted grain with it). The temperature thus employed is usually around 55° Celsius (131° Fahrenheit). A typical floor maltings is a long, single-story building with a floor that slopes slightly from one end of the building to the other. Floor maltings began to be phased out in the 1940s in favor of 'pneumatic plants'. Here large industrial fans are used to blow air through the germinating grain beds and to pass hot air through the malt being kilned. Like floor maltings these pneumatic plants are batch processes but of considerably greater size, typically 100 tonne batches compared with 20 tonne batches for a floor maltings.

Malt categories

Malt is often divided into two categories by brewers: base malts and specialty malts. Base malts have enough diastatic power to convert their own starch and usually that of some amount of starch from unmalted grain, called adjuncts. Specialty malts have little diastatic power; they are used to provide flavor, color, or "body" (viscosity) to the finished beer. Caramel or crystal malts are specialty malts that have been subjected to heat treatment that converts their starches to sugars non-enzymatically. Within these categories are a variety of types distinguished largely by the kilning temperature (see mash ingredients). In addition, malts are distinguished by the two major species of barley used for malting, two-row and six-row.

See also

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• Mash ingredients
• Beer style
• Malta (soft drink)
• Malt beverage
• Malt liquor

Bibliography

• D.E. Briggs, Malts and Malting, Kluwer Academic / Plenum Publishers (30 Sep 1998), ISBN 0412298007
• Christine Clark, The British Malting Industry Since 1830, Hambledon Continuum (1 Jul 1998), ISBN 1852851708