Mash ingredients

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Malted barley – a primary mash ingredient

Mash ingredients, mash bill, or grain bill are those materials used in brewing from which a wort can be obtained for fermenting into alcohol. Mashing is the act of creating and extracting fermentable and non-fermentable sugars and flavor components from grain by steeping it in hot water, and then allowing it to rest at specific temperature ranges in order to activate naturally-occurring enzymes in the grain that convert the starches to sugars. The sugars will be separated from the mash ingredients and then converted to alcohol and other fermentation products by yeast in the brewing process.

A typical primary mash ingredient is grain that has been malted. Modern-day malt recipes generally consist of a large percentage of a light malt and, optionally, smaller percentages of more flavorful or highly colored types of malt. The former is called "base malt"; the latter is known as "specialty malts".

The grain bill of a beer or whisky may vary widely in the number and proportion of ingredients. For example, in beer-making, a simple pale ale might contain a single malted grain, while a complex porter may contain a dozen or more ingredients. In whisky production, Bourbon uses a mash made primarily from maize (often mixed with rye or wheat and a small amount of malted barley), and Single Malt Scotch exclusively uses malted barley.


Further information: Mashing




The adoption of BeerXML as a standard is leading to the development of ingredients databases[1] which attempt to standardise ingredients definitions and characteristics of mash fermentables.



Pilsner malt[edit]


Pale malt[edit]

Pale malt is the basis of pale ale and bitter and the precursor in production of most other British beer malts. Dried at temperatures sufficiently low to preserve all the brewing enzymes in the grain, it is light in color and, today, the cheapest barley malt available due to mass production. It can be used as a base malt, that is, as the malt constituting the majority of the grist, in many styles of beer. Typically, English pale malts are kilned at 95–105 °C. Color ASBC 2-3/EBC 5–7. Diastatic power (DP) 45 °Lintner.

Mild malt[edit]


Amber malt[edit]

Amber malt is a more toasted form of pale malt, kilned at temperatures of 150–160 °C, and is used in brown porter; older formulations of brown porter use amber malt as a base malt [2](though this was diastatic and produced in different conditions from a modern amber malt). Amber malt has a bitter flavor which mellows on aging, and can be quite intensely flavored; in addition to its use in porter, it also appears in a diverse range of British beer recipes. ASBC 50-70/EBC 100–140; amber malt has no diastatic power.

Stout malt[edit]


Brown malt[edit]


Chocolate malt[edit]


Black malt[edit]


Crystal malt[edit]

A paler example of Crystal malt


Distiller's malt[edit]


Peated malt[edit]

Peated malt is also available; this is distiller's malt that has been smoked over burning peat, which imparts the aroma and flavor characteristics of Islay whisky and some Irish whiskey. Some recent brewers have also included peated malt in interpretations of Scotch ales, although this is generally ahistorical. When peat is used in large amounts for beer making, the resulting beer tends to have a very strong earthy and smoky flavor which most mainstream beer drinkers would find extremely irregular.

Vienna malt[edit]


Munich malt[edit]




Acid malt[edit]


Other malts[edit]

Honey malt is an intensely flavored, lightly colored malt. 18–20 °L.


Unmalted barley[edit]

Unmalted barley kernels are used in mashes for some Irish whiskey.


Black barley is like roast barley except even darker, and may be used in stouts. It has a strong, astringent flavor and contains no enzymes.[2]



Other grains[edit]


Wheat malt[edit]


Torrefied wheat[edit]


Raw wheat[edit]


Wheat flour[edit]

Until the general availability of torrefied wheat, wheat flour was often used for similar purposes in brewing. Brewer's flour is only rarely available today, and is of a larger grist than baker's flour.



Sorghum and millet[edit]


Rice and maize[edit]

In the US, rice and maize (corn) are often used by commercial breweries as a means of adding fermentable sugars to a beer cheaply, due to the ready availability and low price of the grains. Maize is also the base grain in chicha and some caium, as well as Bourbon whiskey and Tennessee Whiskey; while rice is the base grain of happoshu and various mostly Asian fermented beverages often referred to as "rice wines" such as sake and makgeolli; maize is also used as an ingredient in some Belgian beers such as Rodenbach to lighten the body.

Maize was originally introduced into the brewing of American lagers because of the high protein content of the six-row barley; adding maize, which is high in sugar but low in protein, helped thin out the body of the resulting beer. Increased amounts of maize use over time led to the development of the American pale lager style. Maize is generally not malted (although it is in some whiskey recipes) but instead introduced into the mash as flaked, dried kernels. Prior to a brew, rice and maize are cooked to allow the starch to gelatinize and thereby render it convertible.

Non-grain solids[edit]

Buckwheat and quinoa, while not grains, both contain high levels of available starch and protein, while containing no gluten. Therefore, some breweries use these plants in the production of beer suitable for people with Celiac disease, either alone or in combination with sorghum.

Syrups and extracts[edit]

Main article: Adjunct (beer)

Another way of adding sugar or flavoring to a malt beverage is the addition of natural or artificial sugar products such as honey, white sugar, Dextrose, and/or malt extract. While these ingredients can be added during the mash, the enzymes in the mash do not act on them. Such ingredients can be added during the boil of the wort rather than the mash, and as such, are also known as copper sugars.

One syrup which is commonly used in the mash,[citation needed] however, is dry or dried malt extract or DME. DME is prepared by mashing malt in the normal fashion, then concentrating and spray drying the resulting wort. DME is used extensively in homebrewing as a substitute for base malt. It typically has no diastatic power because the enzymes are denatured in the production process.

Regional differences[edit]


British brewing makes use of a wide variety of malts, with considerable stylistic freedom for the brewer to blend them. Many British malts were developed only as recently as the Industrial Revolution, as improvements in temperature-controlled kilning allowed finer control over the drying and toasting of the malted grains.


Continental Europe[edit]

Before controlled-temperature kilning became available, malted grains were dried over wood fires; Rauchmalz (German: smoked malt) is malt dried using this traditional process. In Germany, beech is often used as the wood for the fire, imparting a strongly smoky flavor to the malt. This malt is then used as the primary component of rauchbier; alder-smoked malt is used in Alaskan smoked porters. Rauchmalz comes in several varieties, generally named for and corresponding to standard kilned varieties (e.g. Rauchpilsener to Pilsener); color and diastatic power are comparable to those for an equivalent kilned grain.


The United States[edit]









Biscuit malt is a lightly flavored roasted malt used to darken some Belgian beers. 45–50 EBC/25 °L.

Aromatic malt, by contrast, provides an intensely malty flavor. Kilned at 115 °C, it retains enough diastatic power to self-convert. 50–55 EBC/20 °L.

See also[edit]



  1. ^ "The Beer Database Project". 
  2. ^ a b Daniels, Ray (2000). Designing Great Beers. Boulder, Colorado: Brewers Publications. pp. 20–24. ISBN 978-0-937381-50-2. 



External links[edit]