BrewBama, thanks for the link.
Big Monk, thanks for explaining your rationale.
I just tasted a gravity & pH sample from my first brew with Simpson’s Golden Promise (I know, how did I not get to this before.) I think I’m in love.
My personal favorite
Jim, your frequent enthusiastic endorsement was a factor in my deciding to finally shell out for a bag. Now I’m already hooked , at least I see I can go to Morebeer, pay shipping, and still save $10 over LHBS. (OTOH it’s always going to be incredibly fresh at LHBS. They also have a distillery and it’s the base of their whiskey, so they buy boatloads. The smell coming from back there was another factor in my decision.)
I like the GP from Simpsons over other maltster.
I know this is an older thread but as I re-viewed the Seminars from the 2017 AHA Conference, I re-noticed a really good spiel by Briess concerning the Hot Steep Method of Sensory Analysis. In other words, if you don’t have the experience that some of the well-seasoned folks who’ve replied here have, you can taste the malt before you brew with it. It’s a really simple process, and in the OP’s case you could hot steep all MO, all 2 row, and/or the split to see which you prefer. You could even do variations on the split to see if you like more of this vs that.
IMO, Briess has stepped up their game and I’d like to try some of their newer offerings like Synergy Select Pilsen in this SHM process.
We wrote about a very similar technique in Experimental Brewing. At experimentalbrew.com, Drew has dine a writeup of malt tasting using this method and a sous vide machine.
Interesting. When the young lady giving the talk said to heat the water to 140* I though of my sous vide.
My LHBS started carrying Simpson’s Golden Promise over a year ago and I love the flavor in my brews. I was worried it wouldn’t get enough use for them to continue, but they tell me distillers like it as well. I recently used it in an ESB, but I’ve used it in a number of places where it supposedly wasn’t the right malt. Made for a yummy if unusual take on California Common.
My LHBS also has a distillery. They use Simpsons GP for their own whisk(e)y, which BTW is dangerously delicious (glad it’s expensive) so I know they’ll keep it around. I just tapped this first brew with it, and I’m not disappointed at all. Given the low color and rich, full, but very generically malty flavor, I look forward to trying it in a pale lager. It doesn’t have to go in an ale just because it’s English. Excuse me, I need to drink some more of this tasty stuff.
How I wish I had the opportunity to taste each malt before I bought it. It’s all pre-weighed in bags here, and you buy it first and taste it later. But, it all makes drinkable beer.
We have two or three upstart maltsters here in Colorado that I’m eager to check out. I bought pale malt, pils and vienna from one (Root Shoot). I made a NE-style pale ale with the pale malt and it’s very different from anything any pale malt I’ve ever tried. It has a very present honey and toasted wheat bread flavor. I’d think it was the wrong grain but I weighed and bagged it myself and that’s how the shop describes the grain.
We have some upstarts in Ohio too, and I’ve tried pale malts from two of them, both made from the same variety of Ohio-grown barley. One maltster runs a small, manual floor-malting operation and makes a very wide variety of products. The malt performed quite poorly, and I can’t comment on the taste, because there just wasn’t much taste there to comment on. The other maltster, just opened, runs an industrial, German drum system and makes just base malts (Pils, Pale, Vienna and Munich,) with a capacity of nearly 1400 metric tons per year. It is truly some of the best malt I’ve ever used. And since I can get a bag for cheaper than Briess or Rahr, it may become my go-to. So it’s interesting to see what a difference malting, rather than barley variety, can make, and also that “artisanal” or what not isn’t necessarily best.
Very true, Robert. The matter makes a lot more differences the variety.