Proximity Malted Oats – Why They Work, How to Use Them - Proximity Malt

Proximity Malted Oats – Why They Work, How to Use Them

Proximity Malt, 03-18-2021

One of our most popular non-barley malted products is Malted Oats. With the current trend toward hazy beers and a resurgence in stouts as well, malted oats are a welcomed solution to some age-old problems – stuck mashes, slow run-off and blind filtration, which we explain below.

WHY MALTING MATTERS FOR OATS

The complex carbohydrates (polysaccharides) from the cell walls in oats that lead to good heart health, beta glucan and arabinoxylan are the same ones that’ll gum up the lauter tuns and give brewers filtration problems, unless they’re dealt with in the malthouse. With malted oats, those polysaccharides break down through the germination step in malting.

When malted, the oats which also keep their hull intact, no longer provide the difficult-to-manage gummy viscosity in your mash. What remains is a whole kernel that produces the same “silky” mouthfeel character of oats while minimizing or eliminating the risks of:

  • stuck mashes and slow lautering,
  • potential blind filters downstream in the brewhouse
  • insufficient hull material to compensate for the extra viscosity

 SUBSTITUTION GUIDE

Use Proximity Malted Oats in a 1:1 replacement ratio to your current oats, whether rolled, flaked or gelatinized. Experiment with increasing malted oats usage in your brews to discover your ideal haziness, flavor and mouthfeel: since malted oats won’t contribute to stuck mashes or slow run-off like their un-malted cousins, you’ll find you can use them at a higher inclusion rate.

Bonus – no need for additional rice hulls! Why? Our malted oats have hulls intact and the need for extra hull material in your kettle is reduced given the reduction in malted oat viscosity.

Working with pre-milled malted oats takes the guesswork out of the grist, so you may want to try that option to begin with. However, whole kernel malted oats will store better, be less enticing for bugs, and will remain fresh longer. Once you make the switch to whole kernel, ensure your maximizing efficiency by following these steps regarding your grist:

  • Regularly analyze the grist that works for you now. Mill the oats to a particle size distribution that reflects your current grist. Be ready to adjust, since oat kernels are generally thinner than barley or wheat. You may benefit from a slight decrease in the gap between the rollers, if such micro-adjustments are possible in your system.
  • Use a #14 assortment screen and try to target 70% retained on that screen, visually checking to see that each kernel is at least “cracked” open. Water and osmotic pressure will do the work for you in the mash to extract the goodness contained in the kernel, as long as it’s cracked.

Proximity Malted Oats compared to Golden Naked Oats

Golden Naked Oats from Simpsons are hull-less while Proximity Malted Oats have hulls intact (see above). Moreover, Golden Naked Oats are a crystalized malt, at about 5L ASBC. Our malted oats are not crystalized. Similar to our base malt, the color specification on Proximity Malted Oats is 2.5L

Bag weight of Malted Oat versus base malt

Whole grain malted oats come in 50 lb bags just like our base malt, we expect it to be the same when we go to 55 lb bags. It weighs out the same as malt.

Note that Proximity’s pre-milled malted oats stow at 40 lbs in a standard 50 lb bag. As we transition to 55 lb. bags in 2021, we expect the pre-milled oats to stow at approximately 44 lbs., to be confirmed.

NICK MARRON & RYAN ALVAREZ of HARLAND BREWING San Diego, CA:

We sat down recently to discuss Colloidal Stability in Hazy IPAs with Nick and Ryan from Harland Brewing in San Diego. Here’s one thought they shared about the role of Malted Oats: “Because Proximity’s malted oat product has that hard husk on the outside, we don’t have to add rice hulls. It’s helping us with our mash filtration given how hard that outer hull is. We run it through the mill tight, just to crack it. Every time we forget to use it, and the lauter gums up, we remind ourselves, we’ve got use malted oats every time – it acts in both ways–as a malt flavor purpose and also as a process aid. “

Watch the first in our Malt In Brewing Series, with Nick Marron and Ryan Alvarez from Harland Brewing, sharing their knowledge about Colloidal Stability in Hazy IPAs.

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