Just looking at malts from different suppliers, is there a brand or brands that are better quality than others? Or are they all a similar product?
So far I've come across...
Bestmalz
Weyermann
Crisp
Looking at buying 25 kilo sacks of uncrushed.
Any help or info from using any of these brands (or different!) would be great.
Cheers
Bear in mind that this is a question like asking what is the best car, a lot depends on who you ask. Nissans vastly outsell Ferraris, so does that mean Nissan make a better car than Ferrari? Or does it mean that most people just want something that's good enough for the school run, and is cheap?
On the other hand, the fact that Ferrari are still in business suggests that they have advantages that outweigh their higher prices, even if only a minority are prepared to pay the premium for the better product.
So it is with malt. Most people can readily tell the difference between maltsters if you taste them side by side, but that's not something you often get the opportunity to do. There are differences, but it is up to you whether those differences are worth spending extra money on and that depends somewhat on why you are brewing. If I was brewing a golden ale for a competition I would definitely use the best malt I could find - something like Warminster Otter or Simpson Golden Promise - whereas if I was making a Guinness clone for my mates to swill at a Paddy's Day party then I'd save myself a few quid and use generic pale malt from one of the big East Anglian maltsers - the roast malt would swamp any differences in the base malt and they wouldn't care anyway.
Since I don't brew that often the cost difference isn't that material and I take the view that my time is precious so why waste that time on ingredients that are less than the best? So I normally only have one base malt in stock, which is usually a sack of floor-malted pale Otter from Warminster or Fawcett - I might get Simpson Golden Promise next time just for a change.
As a general rule, you won't go too far wrong using malt from the home country of a beer style. But imported malt costs more, particularly since Brexit. And British barley is the envy of the world - it's a bit like with wine, mild cool climates give the best flavour even if they're more challenging for the farmer - so you're fine to use British malt for foreign styles even if the reverse doesn't always work so well. You just have to bland it down a bit to match foreign malts - use "ordinary" British barley rather than the named varieties like Otter and Golden Promise which have more flavour. But you're fine using ordinary extra pale as a substitute for European pilsner malts, and a blend of pale and extra pale to approximate US 2-row.
This kind of thing has been discussed quite a bit in other threads such as
https://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk/threads/maris-otter.101033/#post-1188001
