A comparison of brewing adjuncts

As I'm sure I've already bored you lots of times with this. I'm not publishing excerpts of "Free!" on the blog. Other than recipes, that is. To read the the main text, you're going to have to buy the book.

What I am doing, is sharing some of the source material. The interesting stuff I unearth while researching the book. Often, a couple of thousand words I've found I'll condense down into just a sentence or two.

This probably doesn't come as any surprise: I quite enjoy the process of research. Given how deeply and fundamentally lazy I am, I wouldn't bother doing it if it wasn't fun. Even the really long-winded and tedious stuff. Like transcribing brewing records. I'm currently getting stuck into some William Younger records that I photographed in August 2009.

Getting to today's topic, it's a table of information about grains other than barley. The table appears in the adjuncts section of the brewing materials chapter. With some text that I won't be repeating here. Don't want to get into self-plagiarism. (Something my son Andrew keeps warning me about.) Luckily, I wrote the text a few weeks ago. Which, given my shit memory, means that I can't remember fuck all about it.

Looking at the analyses, the motivation behind using flaked rice - which was, in the early 1880s, in the immediate aftermath of the Free Mash Tun Act, the adjunct of choice - becomes clear. Rice had more starch, and hence higher potential extract, than maize. So why had brewers almost universally switched to maize by 1900? It's very simple. Maize was cheaper than rice. 

A comparison of brewing adjuncts
	rice	maize	oats
Starch	79	55.1	56.1
Water	10.6	12.0	13.6
Oil	0.1	5.5	4.0
Cellulose..	0.2	13.2	1.0
Albuminoids	7.5	8.0	16.5
Carbohydrates ..	1.4	3.0	6.0
Ash	1.0	1.8	2.4
Loss	0.2	1.4	0.4
total	100	100	100
Source:
Thatcher, Frank, A Treatise of Practical Brewing and Malting (The Country Brewers' Gazette, London, 1907), pages 256 - 259.