Independence Brewing Co.

Yesterday we talked about the malting process and why it is important in brewing.  Today we are talking about perhaps the most important malt that we use at Indepedence, Two-Row Pale Malt.
Two-Row Pale malt is our in house base malt and is the primary ingredient in nearly every brew at Independence. It is also a very efficient malt in the sense that we get a high rate of extraction; It is the workhorse of the malts.

Two-Row Pale Malt is a lot of words so let’s break this down:The term Two-Rowrefers to the number of rows of kernels, another American varietal Six-Row Barley has Six-Rows of kernels on each “spike”.  For our purposes, the higher yield of the Two-Row makes for a better base malt versus the Six-Row strain.The term Pale Maltcan refer to both the color and the flavor profile of the malt which result from the kilning process.  Most of our malts are kilned in a cave run by gnomes in South America.  They are very particular about both the temperatures and duration of the kilning process.  Ok, so its not really done by gnomes, but malting is a whole realm of science and art.Pale Malt is kilned at a relatively low temperature for a short amount of time to create a bready, light colored backbone that we use for nearly all of our brews.

Tomorrow we will be talking about Maris Otter, a main ingredient in the ESB!