Malted barley is one of the main ingredients used in brewing beer. It provides complex carbohydrates and sugars that are crucial for fermentation, and it also imparts flavor, body, and color to the final product. The flavor contribution depends largely on the style of malt used. Base, caramel, and roasted malts are all common and each lends unique flavor notes and characteristics. A chew test of whole kernels has traditionally been used as a check for flavor and freshness. While this test provides insight, and has the benefit of being very fast, it does not fully reflect the flavors that are extracted during the brewing process that would be anticipated in the final product. Recently, a Hot Steep Method has been developed to prepare a malt extract for sensory analysis that is more representative of the malt in the beer. In this work, we aim to further investigate these malt extracts with a non-targeted chemical analysis. A variety of malts were prepared according to the Hot Steep Method. The extracts were sampled with head space-solid phase micro-extraction (HS-SPME) to collect the volatile and semi-volatile flavor analytes, and were then subsequently analyzed with gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (GC-MS). This data provided information on individual analytes present in the samples. Many of the observed analytes have known flavor and odor properties which can be connected with the sensory attributes of the malts.
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