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
