What does "malty mess" mean?

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When you see me refer to an ipa being a malty mess it has no bearing on the style of malt being used, it's code for an old stale ipa past it's prime .A good ipa is fresh and balanced, some obviously are much better than others , but if it's fresh it's as the brewer intended. I don't think any brewery submits 6 month old IPAs for things like the GABF, for a reason. I don't brew and really know nothing about malt bills in the process.

 

I don't think that is really fair. At the most basic level most beer has four ingredients: water, yeast, malted grain and a bittering agent (almost always hops). If you leave out the bittering agent, or simply don't use enough, you probably have a beer most people will not like and the reason is not poorly described as its being too malty. I'm not a huge hophead, and I like a lot of sweeter beers, but I still may consider an unbalanced beer to be malty in a bad way (though I'm not sure if I've ever actually said that or not).

 

"Malty mess" sounds delicious actually. I'm imagining a malt bomb doppelbock as I type.

 

My next review is going to be of a DIPA drank past its prime and the description will be: "This once delicious hop-bomb has now turned to an unrecognizable malty mess. "

I understand the frustration with vague descriptions being used without supporting verbs, I just prefer not to denounce all persons that use a term at once since there are likely a few out there that make sense of it in their reviews. I'll certainly be on the lookout for things like this now though!

 

When my homebrew boils over.

 

I still think you are taking things a bit too literally.

And it's not so much about reviews, but the general tone of the conversation on the forums. There is definitely a contingent out there that has a pretty narrow view of what constitutes good beer, and the use of the term 'malty mess' to describe what is essentially a quality beer is usually a pretty good clue that this is where that person is coming from.

 

New homebrewers, including me a long time ago, go through a phase where they make beers with just about every malt on the shelf at the Homebrew Shop. Those beers are a malty mess.

On a similar note, beers made with too many hops can tune into a mess of hop phenolics and vegetal flavors.

 

From my observation (which is limited) I would agree that there is a bias towards a select few categories of beers here, IPAs, stouts, and sours being among those. This could eventually lead to the term "malty" being viewed as pejorative. However, I am not certain as to how I am taking things "too literally", unless you were referring to the post I made about using those terms in a review but that was for comedic purposes.

All I am saying is that at the end of the day anyone here saying this:

"Any remark that uses 'malty' in a disparaging way says more about the commenter than about the beer."

Is just as guilty of generalizing as someone that believes malt in all forms is a bad thing. I contend that there are times that malt flavor can detract from a good brew, just like too much, or off-tasting hop flavors can.

 

The best way I can describe the term 'malty mess' is how I felt after drinking Hopslam after 2 months. Hops completely gone, aroma and taste totally diminished. Tasted like honey and burnt biscuit malts.

Try hopslam fresh and after 2-3 months (If you have it readily available) and you will understand.

 

That's true, to some extent. There was a subtext to my comment that was speaking about a certain 'type', which I have hopefully laid out a little more clearly since- so, yeah, there was some generalizing going on. But I also didn't mean that in the context of a review or discussion there isn't such a thing as the malt character being overdone or incongruous with the other flavors (and that's the more 'literal' interpretation that you seem to have taken). On that part we are in full agreement.

 

I think I am tracking now and it sounds like we are on the same page really, just approaching from different angles. I will say that BA forums are some of the best I've encountered to have productive and friendly conversation/debate on.

 

Definitely, and cheers to that!

 

I think a malty mess would be a beer that has malts that don't complement the hops well, or malts that don't blend well together. A hoppy mess would be harsh bitterness and too faint of aromas or hop varieties that don't mesh well.

 

I could really go for a malty mess right now. All I have in the fridge is 5 gross ass boomerang IPAs.

 

A "malty mess" to me would mean a beer that is unbalanced in a bad way toward the malt end of the beer continuum. Also, my soiled diaper mocks me.

 

The concept that when the "hops fade" in an IPA or other highly hopped beer as a beer gets old, it somehow allows the original "malty" sweetness to come to the forefront, ignores the fact that fading hop flavor and bitterness is but one of a number of flavors aspect of a beer going stale.

Another is that the beer also become sweeter and "toffee-like" as noted in the famous Dalgliesh graph:



Increased sweetness is an old beer is not simply the original malt flavor "revealed", but one more indication that the beer has gone stale.

 

Part of this is people picking up on the common jargon. I am pretty sure I used "hot, boozy mess" last night and I know I have copied the term hop bomb. The terms get used frequently, people read them, and figure it is part of beer vernacular. These vague terms then perpetuate themselves, but when somebody asks what they really mean, no one is quite sure. Since the majority aren't professional beer critics, seems inevitable that "slang" terms will creep into the vocabulary.

 

For those that aren't familiar with "ribes", it is for the compounds that make a beer "catty". The leaves and stems of ribes (currants are an example) are said to smell like tomcat urine.

 

Are there any such figures where the axes are actually tied to numerical scale values?

 

This may sound sarcastic, but try the non alcoholic drink Malta... thats the flavor I would decribe as a malty mess.