New book on mashing by Dr Evan Evans

Australia | Being locked down in Tasmania and unable to travel anywhere, Dr Evan Evans put his free time to excellent use. He wrote a book simply called Mashing.

As he said, it was in the 1990s when he coined the phrase “from grass to glass” to summarise his personal perspective on malting quality, and how such understandings and improvements might enable brewers to produce better quality beer and more of it. When he explained his work to an Australian war veteran (Vietnam) in this way, he got the retort: “That’s national service!”

He now applied this perspective to the organisation and topics in this book on mashing. “I think this has led to a rather unique description and perspective on the mashing process, ranging from the foundational to brewing application. Rather than focusing on the brewing engineering, I have sought to explain how the equipment interacts with malt quality, so that a knowledgeable brewer can fine-tune the brewing process to consistently produce the style/brand of beer desired.”

Such an understanding can also assist the brewer in making adjustments that might be applied to produce a new beer brand, or maintain consistency of a current brand.

By talking with many maltsters and brewers over the years, it became abundantly clear to him that the most useful practical advances in malt quality and brewing came from relatively subtle tweaks and rarely from headline quantum shifts.

To this end, Mr Evans has looked to include practical examples of what happens when the mashing process is modified. This includes mash temperature, liquor quality, malting grinding (fineness), water to grist ratio and mash time.

In each case, the wort outcomes are interpreted in terms of the impact on malt quality and the underlying malt enzymes, proteins and substrates (e.g. starch, cell walls, proteins etc). A such, he has striven to provide a holistic understanding of the mashing stage of brewing by encompassing malt quality, equipment and process control.

Mashing by Evan Evans can be pre-ordered from the MBAA website for USD 49. It will be shipped in August. It can also be requested via the BRAUWELT online shop at https://www.carllibri.com.