Most experienced SMaSH brewers tend to select medium alpha hops because they let you achieve a good beer balance with a single addition. The best advice I have is to go to get samples of several hops and smell them, taste them, and pick one that balances the malt you are using. The hops also provides defining character. Popular malts for SMaSH include Maris Otter, Pilsner, Pale Malts and Munich Malts. Since malt is so important to a SMaSH beer, you need to pick a flavorful malts. You only have to choose one malt to use, one hop to use, and one yeast and then how you are going to mash and ferment it. The simplicity of SMaSH makes recipe design really easy. Also, you can create a single base mash and consider breaking it out into multiple batches using different hops if you have sufficient equipment. It lets you truly understand what one hop and one malt bring to the beer. Since it emphasizes the flavors of a single malt and a single hops it can really help to define those flavors for the brewer. SMaSH brewing is also a great educational experience for the brewer. The best beer styles for SMaSH are as follows: Pilsner (all kinds), Vienna Lager, Saison, Munich Dunkel, Wild Ales, IPAs and even Barleywine. Obviously SMaSH brewing is not suited to every beer style. The idea is to break brewing down to its basic elements and emphasize the flavor of a single malt and single hop variety. SMaSH stands for “Single Malt and Single Hops”. SMaSH BrewingĪ group of dedicated home brewers have coined the term “SMaSH” to help drive simpler brewing. Yet they make award winning beers from a small stock. They simply cannot afford to maintain a large stock of dozens of ingredients – they have to be able to create a variety of beers with a limited set of ingredients. So a single hop addition, or perhaps one for bitterness and one for aroma would be bettter.Ĭommercial brewers, particularly craft brewers, avoid complexity at all costs. Recent research indicates that most aromatic hop oils are fragile, and boil off in 10 minutes or less. A good example is the old policy of adding hops at 60, 45, 30 and 15 minutes. Over time I’ve increasingly come to the conclusion that complexity can be expensive – both in terms of cost and also in terms of quality and time. Unfortunately the results were less than stellar – absolutely mediocre beer. My first attempts at recipe design included at least 5 specialty malts, four hop additions, water additions and a bunch of other stuff. The tendency is to add everything but the kitchen sink to make that first recipe as special as possible. Most home brewers, myself included, when starting to design their own recipes trend towards the extremely complex. It cuts to the heart of what a single malt and single hop tastes like, and also saves you time and money. Simplified home brewing has some significant rewards. Follow is a relatively new approach to home brewing based on simplicity.
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