MALT, denotes barley cured, or prepared to fit it for making a potable liquor, under the denomination beer or ale. See BREWING.
MALT-Liquors have different names as well as different virtues, properties, and uses, both from the different manners of preparing the malt, whence they are distinguished into pale and brown; and from the different manners of preparing or brewing the liquors themselves; whence they are divided into beer and ale, strong and small, new and old.
Malt drinks are either pale or brown, as the malt is more or less dried on the kiln: that which is the slenderest dried tinging the liquor least in brewing, and therefore being called pale; whereas that higher dried, and as it were roasted, makes it of a higher colour. A mixture of both these makes an amber colour; whence several of these liquors take their name.
Now, it is certain, the pale malt has most of the natural grain in it, and is therefore the most nourishing; but, for the same reason, it requires a stronger constitution to digest it. Those who drink much of it, are usually fat and sleek in the bloom, but are often cut off by sudden fevers; or, if they avoid this, they fall early into a distempered old age.
The brown malt makes a drink much less viscous, and fitter to pass the several strainers of the body; but, if very strong, it may lead on to the same inconveniences.
ces with the pale: though a single debauch wears off much more easily in the brown.
Dr Quiney observes, that the best pale malt liquors are those brewed with hard waters, as those of springs and wells, because the mineral particles, wherewith these waters are impregnated, help to prevent the cohesions of those drawn from the grain, and enable them to pass the proper secretions the better; as the viscous particles of the grain do likewise defend these from doing the mischief they might otherwise occasion. But softer waters seem best suited to draw out the substance of high dried malts, which retain many fiery particles in their texture, and are therefore best lost in a smooth vehicle.
For the differences in the preparation of malt liquors, they chiefly consist in the use of hops, as in beer; or in the more sparing use of them, as in ale.
The difference made by hops is best discovered from the nature and quality of the hops themselves: these are known to be a subtle grateful bitter; in their composition, therefore, with this liquor, they add somewhat of an alkaline nature, i. e. particles that are sublimed, active, and rigid. By which means, the rosy viscous parts of the malt are more divided and subtilized: and are therefore not only rendered more easy of digestion and secretion in the body, but also, while in the liquor, they prevent it from running into such cohesions as would make it rosy, vapid, and sour.
For want of this, in unhopped drinks, that clammy sweetness, which they retain after working, soon turns them acid and unfit for use; which happens sooner or later in proportion to the strength they receive from the malt, and the comminution that it has undergone by fermentation.
The different strengths of malt liquors also make their effects different. The stronger they are, the more viscous parts they carry into the blood; and though the spirituous parts make these imperceptible at first, yet when those are evaporated, which will be in a few hours, the other will be sensibly felt by pains in the head, nausea at the stomach, and lassitude or listlessness to motion. This those are the most sensible of who have experienced the extremes of drinking these liquors and wines; for a debauch of wine they find much sooner worn off, and they are much more lively and brisk afterwards, than after sipping malt liquors, whose viscous remains will be long before they be shaken off.
Malt liquors, therefore, are, in general, the more wholesome for being small; i. e. of such a strength as is liable to carry a small degree of warmth into the stomach, but not so great as to prevent their being proper diluters of the necessary food. Indeed, in robust people, or those who labour hard, the viscidities of the drink may be broken into convenient nourishment; but in persons of another habit and way of living, they serve rather to promote obstructions and ill humours.
The age of malt liquors is the last thing by which they are rendered more or less wholesome. Age seems to do nearly the same thing as hops: for those liquors which are longest kept are certainly the least viscous; age breaking the viscous parts, and by degrees rendering them smaller, and fitter for secretion.
But this is always determined according to their
strength; in proportion to which, they will sooner or later come to their full perfection as well as decay; for, when ale or beer is kept till its particles are broken and comminuted as far as they are capable, then it is that they are best; and, beyond this, they will be continually on the decay, till the finer spirits are entirely escaped, and the remainder becomes vapid and sour.