°Lintner or degrees Lintner (per pound of grain) is a unit used to measure the ability of a

malt Malt is germinated cereal grain that has been dried in a process known as " malting". The grain is made to germinate by soaking in water and is then halted from germinating further by drying with hot air. Malted grain is used to make beer, wh ...

to reduce

starch Starch or amylum is a polymeric carbohydrate consisting of numerous glucose units joined by glycosidic bonds. This polysaccharide is produced by most green plants for energy storage. Worldwide, it is the most common carbohydrate in human diets ...

sugar Sugar is the generic name for sweet-tasting, soluble carbohydrates, many of which are used in food. Simple sugars, also called monosaccharides, include glucose, fructose, and galactose. Compound sugars, also called disaccharides or double ...

, that is, its

diastatic power Mash ingredients, mash bill, mashbill, or grain bill are the materials that brewers use to produce the wort that they then ferment into alcohol. Mashing is the act of creating and extracting fermentable and non-fermentable sugars and flavor co ...

. While the measurement is applicable to any amylase, in general it refers to the combined α-amylase and

β-amylase β-Amylase (EC 3.2.1.2 , saccharogen amylase, glycogenase) is an enzyme with the systematic name ''4-α-D-glucan maltohydrolase''. It catalyses the following reaction: : Hydrolysis of (1→4)-α-D-glucosidic linkages in polysaccharides so as to ...

used in

brewing Brewing is the production of beer by steeping a starch source (commonly cereal grains, the most popular of which is barley) in water and #Fermenting, fermenting the resulting sweet liquid with Yeast#Beer, yeast. It may be done in a brewery ...

. The term is also generalized to diastatic malt extracts and separately prepared brewing enzymes. The abbreviation °L is official, but in brewing applications it may conflict with °L used for

degrees Lovibond When drinking beer, there are many factors to be considered. Principal among them are bitterness, the variety of flavours present in the beverage and their intensity, alcohol content, and colour. Standards for those characteristics allow a more ...

. JECFA, the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives, defines the degree Lintner as follows: :''A malt has a diastatic power of 100 °L if 0.1 cc of a clear 5% infusion of the malt, acting on 100cc of a 2%

solution at 20°C for one

hour An hour (symbol: h; also abbreviated hr) is a unit of time conventionally reckoned as of a day and scientifically reckoned between 3,599 and 3,601 seconds, depending on the speed of Earth's rotation. There are 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 ho ...

, produces sufficient reducing sugars to reduce completely 5cc of Fehling's solution.'' Note that the amylases used in brewing reach their peak efficiencies around 66 °C. Evaluation of a malt or extract is usually done by the manufacturer rather than by the end user; as a rule of thumb, the total grain bill of a mash should have a diastatic power of at least 40 °L in order to guarantee efficient conversion of all the starches in the mash to sugars. The most active barley malts currently available have a diastatic activity of 110 - 160 °Lintner (385 - 520 °WK). In Europe, diastatic activity is often stated in Windisch–Kolbach units (°WK). These are related approximately to °Lintner by: :

^\circ\mbox = \frac

^\circ\mbox = \left ( 3.5 \times ^\circ\mbox{Lintner} \right ) - 16

. 100.0 °Lintner equals 3.014 × 10⁻⁷ katal or 18.08 enzyme units.

References

External links

"Malt Carbohydrase", JECFA, 1971.
Gives definitions and procedures for measuring diastatic activity. Brewing Units of catalytic activity