SECTION XII.
OF THE DIFFERENT PROPERTIES OF MALT, AND OF THE NUMBER OF ITS FERMENTABLE PARTS.
The consequences resulting from the before-mentioned experiment have already been hinted at. But it is necessary to trace them farther, and to shew how much they tend to the information and use of the brewer.
Germinated barleys, so little dried, as that their particles remain within their sphere of attraction, are not in a preservative state, and therefore cannot properly be termed malts.
The first degree of dryness, which constitutes them such, as we have seen before, is that which occasions them to cause some effervescence. This cannot be effected, when they are dried with less than 120 degrees of heat; the highest that leaves them white. When urged by a fire of 175 degrees, they are charred, black, and totally void of fermentable principles. Now this difference of heat, being 55 degrees, and producing in the grain so great an alteration, as from white to black, the different shades or colors, belonging to the intermediate degrees, cannot, with a little practice, be easily mistaken.
White, we know, from Sir Isaac Newton’s experiments, is a composition of all colors, as black is owing to the absence of them. These two terms indicate the extremes of the dryness of malt. The color, which the medium heat impresses upon it, is brown, which, being compounded of yellow and red, the four tinges which shade malt differently, may be said to be white, yellow, red and black. The following table, constructed on these principles, will, on chewing the grain, readily inform the practitioner of the degree to which his malts have been dried. It is true some doubts have arisen, whether the increase of heat is by equal divisions (according to the scales marked on thermometers) or whether the degrees should not rather be in proportional parts: but if the effect of fire on bodies (as every experiment shews) is exactly corresponding to the expansion it is the cause of, this undetermined question in no wise affects the brewery.
A TABLE of the different Degrees of the Dryness of Malt, with the Changes of Color occasioned by each Increase of the Degrees.
| Degrees. | ||
| 119 | White | White |
| 124 | W. W. Yellow | White turning to a light Yellow. |
| 129 | W. W. Y. Y. | Yellow. |
| 134 | W. W. Y. Y. Red, | High yellow. |
| 138 | W. W. Y. Y. R. R. | Amber. |
| 143 | W. Y. Y. R. R. | Light brown. |
| 148 | Y. Y. R. R. | Brown. |
| 152 | Y. R. R. | High brown. |
| 157 | Y. R. R. Black, | Brown inclining to black. |
| 162 | Y. R. R. B. B. | High brown, speckled with black. |
| 167 | R. R. B. B. | Half brown, half black. |
| 171 | R. B. B. | Coffee color. |
| 176 | Black, | Black. |