Diastatic power of extra pale maris otter

[Consett26]

I ordered a 25kg sack of pale malt but the shop sent extra pale by mistake. I kept it thinking that the only difference between them would be the colour but that appears to not be the case. I'm formulating a recipe in Brewfather using 4.5kg of the extra pale but it comes up with an orange warning: Diastatic power: 53 Lintner. This is reflected in the calculated OG of 1042 rather than the 1045 I was expecting. I can get rid of the message by adding 200g of ordinary pale malt but does it matter - what might the consequences be if I don't? Are there any other differences between extra pale and pale that I should be aware of?

 

[foxbat]

That's strange. It's been a while but I've certainly done brews with 100% extra-pale UK malt and found no difference at all to the outcome vs. ordinary pale malt.

 

[LeeH]

I have read reports that efficiency drops with the extra pale although I have not used it myself.

 

[JT_Brews]

I've been using Crisp Clear Choice extra pale as my default base malt for a while and had no issues. Have you double checked the Brewfather entry actually matches the spec from the maltster?

 

[Braufather]

Interesting. For my next two brews there will be 4kg of golden promise and extra male mo, so will be interesting to compare. I was going to Chuck some Munich in with extra pale anyway.

 

[Sandimas]

Same here, I got extra pale on a previous order as they were out of pale and noticed no difference, other than the colour: target OGs were spot-on.

 

[Hanglow]

The sack should have a lot number on it that you can check with the maltster to get the specs of that particular batch of malt

 

[WonkyDonkey]

Maris Otter
Extra Pale MO

I was only on Crisp's site myself this morning looking for the same information for the same reasons - links above to the two malts in question. According to Crisp the regular MO has a diastatic power of 50 Lintner v 55 Lintner for the Extra Pale.
As has been mentioned above, make sure that the inventory item has the correct value. Also keep in mind that some grains don't themselves have any diastatic power and mainly rely on the base malt to allow conversion, as you add more of the zero power grains the overall diastatic power of the mash will lower. You may have everything set up correctly but this may factor into the lower overall number?

 

[Consett26]

I spoke to Crisp who were very helpful and informative. As others have pointed out the value in the Brewfather inventory is wrong. I had a quick look and couldn't find any other malts with this value supplied so I deleted it from the extra pale and the warning is gone.

The email that Crisp sent makes the now-I-know-it-its-obvious point that extra pale has the pale colour because its been kilned less, which means that fewer enzymes have been destroyed, which in turn means that it actually has *more* diastatic power than darker malts.

The analysis sheet suggests that it has a minimum of 66 degrees Lintner rather than the 55 in the link provided by WonkyDonky above but that this actual batch has 114.

I'll send an update request to Brewfather.

Thanks for the replies.

 

[Hop_it]

I'm not sure whether or not this will be helpful, or will just muddy the water . . . . . A few month ago Crisp sent me a copy of the attached spreadsheet. It is a recipe calculator which they appear to use in their own pilot brewery. The last page shows a table of extract values. The base value for both their standard M/O and their Pale M/O is given as 308. However, they give different moisture levels, which changes the "Extract as is" value. I don't know if this is really significant or not. I suspect probably not in the great scheme of things, and allowing for the inevitable variability and lack of batch to batch consistency of a homebrew setup.
Anyway, the rest of the table is quite useful when creating or tweaking recipes.
Just for the record I use both standard and extra pale M/O, and have never noticed any difference other than the final colour of the beer. I tend to use the pale M/O most of the time but only because I like the resulting colour.