Their uses have been widely debated for adding body and stabilizing foam. Do you use chit, spitz, carapils or carafoam in your helles? If so, which do you prefer?
I generally don’t use any of those, but I definitely plan on incorporating some. I plan to use some Carahell in my next helles, 5% I’m thinking. I usually do 90% pils, and 10% either Vienna or Munich I.
Spitz and Chit are essentially the same: undermodified malt. The malting process reduces the betaglucan content of the raw malt. I prefer to use very small quantities of flaked barley or flaked wheat to produce a similar effect (improving body and heading). It does take more of the wheat product to produce an equivalent betaglucan contribution of flaked barley. Be careful with flaked barley since I find it does have a raw grainy taste that can be objectionable in pale beers. (it pairs well with roasted grain flavors though )
By the way, where can a fella buy some chit malt? I see this Brew Brothers place has it, but are there any other places? A web search isn’t turning up a whole lot of results…
Country Malts doesn’t let me order from them, must be a pro brewer thing. And Best Malz doesn’t either. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough…
I might order some from Brew Brothers eventually, but shipping is insane! I don’t want to order 5lbs of chit malt and pay $15 for shipping. I don’t need much else for ingredients…guess I’m SOL for now.
With that said, my comment regarding the use of flaked barley becomes more salient. Why go to the trouble of sourcing chit malt when it is a less strong version (beta glucan wise) of raw barley? Flaked barley is a gelatanized version of raw barley.
I might have to revisit using a small amount of flaked barley in some of my Pilsners. When I started brewing Pilsners Jeff Renner gave me the advice that a small % of flaked would emulate Chit. Used that for a while, can’t really say why I stopped.