Search, or browse the cellar
Type a malt or maltster, narrow by country and type, or pick flavors to hunt by character. Click any malt for its ranked substitutes.
How the matching works
Substitutes are scored flavor first — the overlap of descriptor tags carries the most weight in every malt class. After flavor comes color (in degrees Lovibond, compared on a scale that tightens for pale malts and loosens for roasted), then diastatic power (which matters most for base malts that have to carry the mash, and is ignored for crystal and roasted), then extract, which is weighted lightly because gravity is the easiest thing to adjust — the Recipe Scaler does it directly. Country of origin is a filter and a gentle tie-breaker, never a score driver, so you can ask "what continental malt gets closest to this English one?"
When a maltster publishes its own equivalent — or when a discontinued malt has a known successor — that published equivalence outranks any computed match and is marked accordingly. The Brewing Classic Styles palette is the first verified pass; values come from maltster spec sheets and established references, and a few entries where a branded figure or flavor call is uncertain are marked with a ▲ for review.
Discontinued malts stay searchable so a recipe written around one still resolves — but they're never offered as substitutes, since you can't buy them. The big traced lineages: DeWolf-Cosyns is now Castle Malting's Château line, and Hugh Baird is now Bairds Malt.
Diastatic power figures vary by crop and maltster; treat them as typical. This database is shared with the Recipe Scaler's maltster layer — verified once, used in both.
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