It happens to many of us: You grab a recipe from a trusted book or magazine, walk into the grain room of your local homebrew shop and reach for the base malt. “2-Row Pale,” the recipe says. Easy enough, but there’s a bin of something called “2-Row” sitting next to a bin called “Pale Malt.” What gives?
The real confusion is not only that the Pale is made from 2-row barley (as opposed to 6-row barley) but that 2-Row is paler in color than Pale.
It might be helpful if we break it down a bit historically. In the not-so-distant past, 2-row barley was more expensive than 6-row, and the diastatic power (DP) of 2-row barley was not high enough to reliably convert a high percentage of corn or rice so popular for light American lagers and such. Six-row, on the other hand, is diastatically powerful and makes an excellent base in terms of conversion, albeit with some compromises in flavor. It seems 6-row barley’s higher husk-to-kernel ratio contributes a noticeable harshness that is difficult to get around.
Modern malting techniques have improved the 2-row barley DP to the point where it can consistently be relied upon to handle 20 percent or more unmalted grains without the added “huskiness,” pushing it more into favor with brewers. By rights, we can certainly call “2-Row” a pale malt, but generally a maltsters will label their very lightest base malt simply “2-Row,” “Brewer’s Malt,” or something equally generic.
Now the real question as a brewer is: which of these two malts—2-Row or Pale—will make the best beer? Of course any high-quality base malt with appropriate DP will make very tasty beer, but generally speaking the Pale with its higher Lovibond rating (about 3.5°L) will give much more of a bready/biscuit note in the malt profile than will the lighter 2-Row (about 1.8°L). For a classic pale beer, you may appreciate the extra depth in the base malt that the Pale will bring, but if you’re looking for a very delicate touch on the malt aspect, 2-Row will deliver. In broad terms, we can lump 2-Row in with Continental Pilsner and use them effectively one for the other. In fact, if your favorite craft brewery has a silo sitting outside, you can bet it is full of the simplest and lightest domestic 2-row barley available and that the tasty Kölsch they make is brewed with the very same base as the IPA and likely even the Pilsner.
We homebrewers are not generally saddled with having to use a single base malt for everything, but if you’re the one who lives an hour from your LHBS and buys sacks of base malt at a time to mill at home, you can trust 2-Row to help with generally any beer style you like to make. Should you find yourself stuck with using this most basic and “clean slate” malt available for all of your beers, consider a judicious touch of low-kiln specialty malt such as Biscuit, Victory, Amber, Honey, or Melanoidin to build up the malt flavor profile when needed.
Conversely, unless you are a stickler for “style” and/or are brewing competitively, challenge yourself to mix and match base malts to bring a uniqueness to an otherwise played-out beer style. I recently heard from a talented homebrewer of his amber ale using German Dark Munich as the base. I myself have made a right tasty ESB using Vienna Malt, which happens to have about the same Lovibond rating as the precious Maris Otter we all love.
Craft beer has outgrown the strict regional and historical upbringings and is ripe for experimentation for new flavor combinations—not just with base malts, but it could equally be that your perfect amber ale comes from Belgian Pale, German Crystal Malts, and a ton of say, Hallertauer hops!
Yur Doing it Wrong! Amber
ALL-GRAIN
Batch size: 5 gallons (19 liters)
Brewhouse efficiency: 75%
OG: 1.052
FG: 1.012
IBUs: 24
ABV: 5.3%
MALT/GRAIN BILL
9.5 lb (4.3 kg) Belgian “2-Row Pale!”
12 oz (340 g) German CaraMunich III
6.4 oz (181 g) German Carared
0.8 oz (23 g) Briess Midnight Wheat
HOPS SCHEDULE
1 oz (28 g) Perle [8%AA] at 60 minutes
2oz (57 g) Hallertauer Mittelfrueh at 0 minutes
YEAST
White Labs WLP007 Dry English Ale or Wyeast 1098 British Ale
DIRECTIONS
Mash at 152°F (67°C) for an hour. Boil for 75 minutes, following the hops schedule. Chill, pitch the yeast, and ferment at 64–68°F (18–20°C).