Brewing a single malt single hop beer to learn your ingredients

What a SMaSH beer is

SMaSH stands for single malt and single hop. The whole beer is brewed with one type of malt and one hop variety, plus yeast and water. There is no crystal malt adding caramel and no second hop adding a different aroma. Whatever you taste comes from that one malt, that one hop and the yeast.

It is not a style. A SMaSH can be a pale ale, a lager or something in between, depending on the malt, hop and yeast you choose. It is a learning tool that happens to make good beer.

Why it teaches so much

When you brew a recipe with five malts and three hops, you cannot tell which ingredient gave the biscuit note or which hop gave the grapefruit. A SMaSH isolates them.

Brew two SMaSH beers with the same malt but different hops. The differences you taste are the hops. Brew two with the same hop but different malts. Then you learn the malts. After a handful of batches you have a mental library of what your ingredients actually contribute. That makes reading a recipe, or designing your own, far easier. Our guide to reading a beer recipe makes much more sense after this.

Choosing the malt

The malt has to carry the whole beer, so pick one with enough character.

• Maris Otter or another English pale ale malt: rich, bready and biscuity. A classic SMaSH choice.
• Pilsner malt: light, grainy, sweet and the most delicate of the three. Needs a long, vigorous boil.
• Vienna or Munich malt: toasty and malty, with more colour. They work as a single malt, though Munich has less enzyme power, so lighter Munich types are safer.

Our guide to base malts describes each one in more detail. Imported malts are what most Indian homebrewers can buy, so the choice usually comes down to what your supplier has fresh.

Choosing the hop

Pick a hop you want to understand. Popular SMaSH hops include Cascade, Citra, Mosaic, Simcoe and Nelson Sauvin for fruity, modern flavours, or Saaz, Hallertau and East Kent Goldings for gentler, traditional character. Our guide to hop varieties for beginners describes what each brings.

Use the same hop for bittering and aroma. A high alpha hop gives bitterness efficiently. A low alpha hop needs a larger bittering addition, which can make the beer taste slightly vegetal. That itself is worth learning.

Freshness matters more in a SMaSH than anywhere else, because there is nothing to hide a tired hop. Hops that sat warm in a courier van or a shop shelf lose aroma and pick up a cheesy note. Buy vacuum sealed pellets with a recent harvest year, keep them in the freezer and open the packet on brew day. If a hop smells dull in the packet, it will taste dull in the beer. You will learn the wrong lesson about the variety.

A starting recipe and a tasting plan

For 20 litres at about 1.050: 4.8 kg Maris Otter (100%), mashed at 66 °C for 60 minutes. Bitter to about 30 IBU at 60 minutes with your chosen hop. Add 25 g at 10 minutes and 50 g at flameout. Use a clean American ale yeast and ferment at 18 to 20 °C.

Then taste with a plan. Pour a glass beside a small bowl of the crushed malt and a few hop pellets rubbed between your palms. Smell each, then the beer. Write down what you notice: the colour, the malt flavour, the hop aroma, the bitterness and the finish. The notes matter more than the beer. In six months you will look back on them when designing something new.

Making it a series

The real value comes from brewing several in a row. Keep the malt constant and change the hop each time, or the reverse. Brew small, 5 or 10 litre batches, so you can try more combinations. If you can, brew two at once and taste them side by side. A blind comparison, where someone else pours, removes your own expectations.

This kind of controlled tasting is how professional brewers learn ingredients too. It turns brewing from following instructions into understanding.