One of the easiest ways to learn about the flavor that a base malt provides is to stop by your LHBS and chew on a couple of kernels of the base malt. Better yet, find the most experienced person at the LHBS and ask for help when you this.
After doing this, we should have a pretty good understanding of the flavor that pale malt, golden promise, and aromatic malt provides.
But how do we get a feel for what light DME / LME tastes like? If we knew what the various DME / LMEs were made of - that would help. So we could go to the malters web site or we could find someone who has done the work for us:
Decide what the base malt for the DME / LME is, chew on a couple of kernels and let our taste buds decide if this is a good conversion (or not).
