Disclaimer: All malting and brewing were performed in full clothing.
Over a year ago, I began working on a sprouting project for a customer using naked oats. While working with this ingredient, I thought it would be a great opportunity to evaluate its performance as a brewing material. Using the data collected from sprouting, including enzyme and flavor development, I created a malting program to assess the oats as 3 distinct products: An enzymatically active base malt, a Munich-style base malt and a high color malt.
After pilot malting, I brewed seven beers with my co-pilot, Dan Bies. Five beers were brewed at 51% inclusion, and two beers were brewed using 100% malted oats. To my surprise, both recipes posed little difficulty in the brewhouse, with only slightly slower runoff and cloudier wort coming from the 100% oat brew. Considering that naked oats are naturally hulless and have a relatively small kernel size, I expected a much more difficult lautering process.
While brewing, I wanted to choose beer styles that typically include a large proportion of non-barley malt ingredients to appropriately highlight the contributions of the naked oats. For the 51% inclusion, I fermented with five yeast strains; Cream Ale, American Ale, Weihenstephan, Bavarian Wheat Blend and Bavarian Wit. For the 100% oat recipe, I fermented with American Ale and Bavarian Wheat yeast strains…
To learn more about Jordon Geurt’s discoveries when brewing naked . . .oats, join him this Friday, October 13th at the Master Brewers Conference in Atlanta, GA, for his seminar.
Master Brewers Conference | Technical Sessions
Malting and brewing naked…oats.
Friday, October 13 • 8:00 a..m – 9:45 a.m.
Jordon Geurts, Briess Technical Service Associate
