So I'm using my little air still to try experiments on what different mash ingredients taste like on their own. And I decided to try a darker toasted malt.

My last batch was 100% pale ale malt, and the result was really nice, but the malt flavor came through was really subtle. The darker roasted Munich malt itself had a stronger malt aroma, so I thought maybe, let's give it a try and see.

It's... Not very good.

There is a much more present strong malt flavor, with some dark toast notes. Some interesting apple/pair, tropical-ish fruit notes up top. Some interesting lovely apple/pair, almost tropical fruit notes up top, and really interesting grain/clean-dried hay/green bean stuff down deep in the hearts. A lot of it seems really lovely, and I would love to have that as a base of a whiskey. But.

Starting from late heads about where the lovely malt flavor starts to come in with a very subtle presence, all the way through hearts, as that lovely malt aroma and flavor get stronger and stronger, there's also this undertone. It's kind of bitter / astringent/almost sour.

It's not tails. When tails came in it was really obvious, that ugly oh god don't put this in your mouth thing, that sticks on your tongue and in your nose when you try it. This stuff isn't that.

And it's not very strong, that background note. I can almost convince myself that I don't taste it enough to matter, because of that lovely malt presence all the way through. But then... It does matter. And it's just not pleasant. And it's there in every single one of my hearts fractions.

I wonder what would happen to that if I put this on wood for a while. I'm going to try that experiment.

I also think it might be lovely to blend a little bit of this with the pale ale malt whiskey I made, or even a couple of earlier batches using distillers malt / grain barley, that just don't have a lot of character on their own. Add a little bit of this to it, and maybe at a low enough concentration I might still get that lovely roasted malt aroma and flavor, but that faint unpleasant note might be diluted out completely. I'm going to try that experiment too. Number of experiments actually, with different blends.

But no, making whiskey using darker roasted malt as the base malt seems like a bad idea.