Assistant Professor in Food Chemistry University of Arkansas, United States
Abstract: Beer is traditionally made using malted barley yet US brewers are struggling with shifts in barley quality and cost. In comparison, rice yields more per acre, has similar prices to malting barley, and has lower price volatility. Additionally, rice is naturally gluten-free (GF), and GF products are on the rise, with market size expected to double between 2023 and 2032, reaching 1.4 billion dollars. Previous research has evaluated malting and brewing qualities of malted rice and has shown both similar and novel sensorial and brewing qualities compared to malted barley. Due to this, rice poses an opportunity to be used as an alternative malting grain. To assess bottlenecks in malted rice production and brewing in pilot scale, four most promising rice cultivars from previous research were chosen to be upscaled from benchtop (2 lbs) to pilot-scale malting (600-700 lbs) in a craft malt house and tested in pilot systems (ranging 0.5 hL to 10 hL) in local, regional, and large breweries. The maltsters and brewers filled out a questionnaire to evaluate their expectations and experiences of using malted rice. Brewers were instructed on how to best utilize malted rice enzymes and were free to use malted rice as base malt or adjunct, and to choose the recipe. The resulting products were evaluated for their physicochemical characteristics (e.g., alcohol, original extract, color, and pH) using ASBC methods, and volatiles were measured using a gas chromatography coupled with a triple quad mass spectrometer (GC-MS/MS). Rice barley showed differences compared to barley malt that could offer potential challenges, like grain handling, higher steeping and germinating temperatures, different water uptake profile, friability. Malted pigmented rice promoted novel color (red hue) and, along with aromatic malted rice, novel flavors to the beer/beer-like product, whereas non-aromatic malted rice had more neutral and malt-like flavors. This study bridges the academia-industry gap, can increase the gluten-free beer-like market, and could promote a novel source of material for brewers to innovate their recipe using American-grown cereal helping to shield the malting and brewing industries from import taxes or raw material price fluctuations.
