Grain inventory redundancy

[philjohnwilliams]

When buying grain for your inventory (I am thinking more about specialty grain here) do you make any effort to avoid having too many different similar grains on hand? The whats in your inventory thread has me looking at my own inventory, and I noticed, for example, that I had 3kg each of carapils and C10 in stock. For the recipes that I use them in these grains are interchangeable, so I was thinking of using up what I have and then restocking only one or the other. Victory and Biscuit malt are two others that I have been able to swap one for the other, so perhaps I could in the future stock only one. Aside from taking less space from stocking fewer grains, they should stay fresher because I should go through them a bit faster. Thoughts?

 

[J A]

Yep...I've mostly tried to find "substitutes" for Caramel/Crystal malts. It's mostly a difference between maltsters but I can definitely taste a big difference between CaraMunich and the equivalent Crystal. UK Brown malt seems to taste richer than Crystal 60 or Crystal 80 (it's in between) so I try to keep that. I tend to stick to European/UK maltsters for that stuff, but it's just personal preference.
To that end, I try to "stock" Belgian Aromatic(light), CaraVienne, CaraMunich, Biscuit, UK Brown Malt, Special Roast and Special B, UK Pale Chocolate, UK Chocolate, Roasted Barley and Debittered or Midnight Wheat.
Sometimes a specific flavor is needed and the dark crystals may push certain flavors more than other equivalent malts and sometimes it's just better to follow a proven recipe that calls for Crystal specifically. I'm not certain Victory and Biscuit are identical, but I'm not sure you'd be able to tell the difference in beers side-by-side.
I hope to do some brew-offs between certain equivalent malts at some point but I haven't figured out a way to split batches post-mash and add specialty malts, other than steeping. Making (and consuming) 5 or 10 gallon batches would be too slow to gather many data points.