Our club is doing a group buy, and I usually get canada malting 2-row, but it has gone up in price a bit, now to 45.99 before the bulk discount.
I saw that we can also get avangard pale for 39.99.
I've read a bit about it from searching, but I wanted to see what anyone's experience been with it. Have any of you used it? What was your experience?
I read one person say that the pale was darker than typical pale malt. A lot of people seem to have a good experience with the pils, and that some of the previous year's crops had a higher extract potential.
I like the canada 2-row because it is so light, so that I can always add specialty malts to darken the beer when needed (I do this especially when I am brewing an English style beer), but that I can also use it for really light beers and even pilseners when needed.
At this point in my brewing, I don't like having multiple 2-row pale malts on hand, and I include pilsener into that for the sake of simplicity of my storage needs. I do keep vienna, munich, wheat, victory, flaked corn, and rye in bulk (buckets with gamma seal lids, I don't get spare sacks for those, just a sack at a time) as well, but I don't cycle through those very quickly. I keep about 25 different specialty malts in 1 gallon plastic screw-on lid containers, and only buy those by the pound when needed.
Since the pale is darker, I would consider moving entirely to their pilsener, which is also the same price. The only concern would be with DMS for me (though, from some of the experiments done recently, I'm not THAT concerned) because I am moving towards 30 minute boils to save time on brewdays (and I still have over 25# of hops in the freezer). I do boil vigorously, and chill quickly (about 8 minutes per 5 gallons through the dual stage counterflow chiller I bought).
Is $6 per bag worth it for me to change what I've been doing for so long? I was planning on getting 5 bags of the canada malting, but I could justify getting a 6th bag if I go with avangard pils. I am also low on munich and vienna, so I was going to get a bag of those as well in this buy, and probably also avangard if I am going to be getting other avangard at the same time.
