Grain tea

Ingredients
1

A few of us here in Yakima recently started a BJCP class which meets at my house.  I’ve just concluded that I want to incorporate a new element to get more familiar with the specific flavors that different malts and grains contribute to beer.  In a recent exchange with Denny, he suggested making teas out of the various malts in order to taste & evaluate them.

So here is what I’m thinking:

Logical groupings: (each grouping at a different meeting)
  *Base malt comparison
  *Crystal Malt comparison
  *Roast malt comparison
OK you get the idea…  What are some other logical groupings?

I have some questions for you all though.
  -What is the best grain to water ratio for grain tea?
  -What is the best temperature for steeping?
  -How fresh does the tea have to be?  If I did it at noon and the meeting was at 7:00 would that be a problem?

I’m also not sure how to best organize a tasting form.  It seems to me that consistently asking the same right questions on an evaluation form (kind of like the BJCP Score Sheet) would be helpful for the process and remembering afterward.

2

Steve, look through the archives for my May/June 2012 Zymurgy article “Recipe Formulation: A Road Map to a Tasty Beer”.  I address that exact subject.  Making the tea a few hours in advance shouldn’t be a problem, although I think I’d keep it refrigerated.

3

Perfect!  Thanks Denny.

4

What I’ve done in the past to evaluate certain specialty grains was to buzz them in a coffee grinder, then run them through my Keurig in one of those “fill your own” type empty K-cups. I used the resulting “grain coffee” and a syringe to dose a relatively neutral beer for tasting.

This worked quite well with dark roasted grains (roast barley, chocolate malt, etc.), and I suspect it would work serviceably well with other grains that make a noticeable impact in small amounts (crystal malt, aromatic/melanoiden, honey malt, etc.). I’m not sure how well this would work for base malts, though.