Black Malt Tea

I've started looking into lab work for my thesis project (more on that some other time). Basically my work involves specialty brewing grains - those brewer's among you know that this includes crystal malt, black malt, chocolate malt, and roast barley. Depending on the grain, they are roasted in a coffee-like roasting drum at high temperatures. Some grains, like black malt and roast barley, are basically burnt.

So these special malts have a lot of flavour. I'll have to do 100% extracts of these (usually they are used in <15%>

Here is what I did:

• Crushed two tablespoons of the grain (crystal, black, or roast barley)
• Placed it in a small French coffee press.
• Added about 200 mL of boiling water
• let it sit for 10 min
• pressed the plunger down, poured off the liquid

Drinking it was interesting...

• Crystal (140 EBC) had exactly what you'd expect - a massive aroma of sweet malt. The flavour was very weak though, but still pretty sweet. It was dark pale in colour.
• The black malt of course created a dead black liquid. The blackness had a red hue, though. Sweet aroma with some burnt notes. Didn't taste too bad actually... it was a little sweet with some astringency.
  
• Roast barley was similar to the black malt, except the colour hue was much more yellow than red. As well, the flavour was much drier compared to the black malt.
  

I suggest people do this with any malt they purchase, you really need to taste the product in some water to get an idea of how what flavour it may add to your beer.

Cheers!