I was loosely following the recipe for English Pale Ale in the book brewing classic styles (christmas present). However, one of the specialty grains, Special Roast, isn't available in the UK (this struck me as rather odd... a recipe for an english ale uses an ingredient not available to the english... oh well). Anyway after some googling and finding there isn't really a replacement for Special Roast, I chose a specialty grain from my favourite homebrew shop. Amber malt-crisp, or crispamber, or crisp amber malt (seems to go by a lot of variations on the name). I chose it because it's described as roasted, so I thought it would be at least along the same lines as Special Roast. This was an extract recipe and the grain was steeped.

Now I've since found out that this grain should have been mashed, but I'm not very clear. One website says is can be mashed or steeped, another says these pale roasted malts don't get to high enough temperature to remove the starch. The Crisp website isn't very helpful, it's listed under Roasted Malts, which from my reading suggests it could be steeped. I can't anywhere find concrete information on whether this grain has starch in it.

Anyway, starch might be in my brew. What will this mean? I used only 113g in a 20L brew.

I plan to RDWHAHB.

Edit: I just steeped some of the leftover grain in a mug and did the iodine test - it went black. So there's starch. The tea was quite nice though.