Consumers are always looking for new flavors in their beer and brewers are eager to bring innovation to their recipes. While much of the attention to new flavors has been focused on hop varieties and adjuncts, there have been other advancements in the brewing space.
Notably, infusion malts that bring deep flavors to a pint are growing in creativity and popularity. ProBrewer contributor John Holl spoke with Cristal Peck, the product innovation manager of Boortmalt, who created the infusion malts. She works out of the company’s Innovation Center in Antwerp, Belgium.
John Holl: Let’s talk about infusion malts and how they were conceived and what they are in terms of raw ingredients.
Cristal Peck: Infusion malts is a creation I came up with when I first started at Boortmalt. My background is as a biologist and a brewer. I was brewing in Berlin before I moved to Belgium for this job. As a brewer, I’ve always been very much targeted towards doing creative beers. I would always do seasonal releases where I utilized various herbs, spices, botanicals, in the brewing process. I’ve always been fascinated by building layers into beers. So, when I started working at Boortmalt and commissioning our Innovation Center, I immediately started thinking about whether or not this concept would actually work in the malting process itself.
In the three phases of the malting process, the water immersion phase, a germination phase, and before the final heat drying phase. We actually have the capability to do a lot of research and development and innovation, ranging from very small volumes all the way up to quite large volume. From 100 grams all the way up to one ton of malt, we’re able to do in our innovation center. In our micro-maltings, I started playing around with adding other various raw ingredients into these three phases of the malting process.
And lo and behold, I discovered very quickly that the effect was actually incredible. These flavor and aroma compounds from these other exogenous ingredients were indeed going into the grain itself throughout this process of the malting phases and the result were these unique, flavored, layered malt varieties, which we’ve since termed Infusion Malts. This process has since actually been patented.
John Holl: As you started thinking about infusion malts, where did you first start with the flavors?
Cristal Peck: I’ve always loved Belgian beers. At some point early on [in my brewing career], I discovered the St. Bernardus Christmas Ale. It’s a quadruple that has been plied with Christmas spices like cinnamon, orange peel, clove, nutmeg, all sorts of things. And that beer changed the way that I viewed brewing beer. I immediately started trying to reproduce a similar beer, which led into various seasonal releases.
So the very first infusion, I was doing micro-maltings and was just doing single ingredients into the steep, the germination and the kiln, just to see whether or not it was working. When I first started putting together combinations, the very first infusion malt that I did was actually a winter infusion malt that was basically the malt equivalent of the St Bernardus Christmas Ale. All the usual Christmasy suspects. I managed to scale that one up to 100 kilograms, so just enough to fill a couple of bags. That led on to something that was more appropriate to the summer. It was the lavender and orange infusion malt. Since then, there’s also been a sage and thyme. Then there’s been the gingerbread cookie.
Currently I’m working on a citrus infusion as well. This one’s filled with beautiful citrus fruits like grapefruit, lemon, lime, orange, all sorts of bright, zesty flavors. That’s a work in progress. That’ll be the next release.
John Holl: When you start to think about a new recipe or a new a new infusion, is it what is popular in the marketplace is a brewers desire? Is it somewhere in the middle where you start thinking about what might be next?
Cristal Peck: I still very much wear a brewers hat, so and I’m very connected with the brewing community. There’s nothing that I love more than liaising with my brewer mates and colleagues and industry peers I feel very much as though my finger is very on the pulse with brewing. Most of the ideas are coming from me coupled with the people that I hang out with, basically like my network. And then occasionally, I will roll over and let my commercial team also give me a few of their ideas.
John Holl: Has there been anything you found that that just doesn’t work?
Cristal Peck: Absolutely, this is really a difficult process, and the the more years I’ve been doing this, the more I find out how fickle it is. In fact, the last barley crop, I was unable to make many of the infusions work at all, and I believe that was to do with protein level or various climate related aspects of the crop.
John Holl: Where is this product taking you as a brewer and biologist?
Cristal Peck: There’s a lot of avenues. For example, we’ve done research on these infusion malts, just to kind of prove a lot of our convictions. We’ve done a lot of volatile fingerprinting, where we’ve mapped the volatile compounds, and this has given us concrete evidence that these flavor and aroma compounds are getting inside the grain, so inside the matrix of the grain itself, which is a really good, because it’s the number one question I get from brewers and distillers.
John Holl: What should brewers and distillers ask themselves before using or experimenting with this product?
Cristal Peck: Each of the infusion malt is seasonal, so they’re always different, which means that we’ve started now writing quite a comprehensive guide to our customers when we supply them with a new infusion malt variety. We also give them these instructions for use, they are getting more and more in depth, because we now take the infusion malts to the lab, we do a whole bunch of analysis on it to get our certificate of analysis.
Beyond that, we also produce different work concentrations, where we incorporate the infusion malts at different inclusions into the grist, so that we can recommend a window of addition into their malt bill. We also test with all the yeast strains that we can think of, so that we get a nice fertilized fermentation profile as well to report back to the brewers and distillers.
So, we really want them to feel very informed when they go into this. And we do try and cater to that with an information sheet for each of the releases.