A treatise on malting barley

[Swede]

Gentlemen....

I know I am new here, but I do have some experience with malting and drying barley for making whiskey and beer.

I will take this opportunity to share with you my experience with making the equipment to malt grains, dry grains and mill the malted and dried grain. I have made a rotary malt floor, repurposed a clothed dryer as a malt kiln, and built from scratch a roller mill for processing grains for mashing.

I have documented these builds on another forum, and with the blessing of the admin of this forum, i will link to those build threads.....

First off, a bit of information on the theory of malting grains:


I realize some here may be using feedstore barley because it's cheap and available, but due to the high protien content, it's likely that you are hitting an insurmountable wall as far as ease of converion goes. I have been doing some work with malting and processing barley from raw grains too, and I know that sourcing a high starch as opposed to a high protien barley is the way to go.

A high starch barley is typically reffered to as "malting barley" and high protien "feed barley". No doubt some of you already know this, and I suspect you also know that this is the key to your difficulties in converting the feed grade flaked barley you have been able to source.

I did my best to source the lowest protien barley avalilable to me, and I found it as a whole grain which worked well for me as i desired to malt raw grain as well.

When malted, even the poorest grains have a certian amount of diastatic power, and are able to convert starches to fementable sugars, this is fine if you are using these grains for malt, -if you are trying to use them to convert unmodified grains. Using these with a low protien, high starch variety of your grain of choice is a great way to access the fermentabe grain sugars for alcohol production.


until next time.........

Swede.

(i will continue this thread step by step outlining the malting and curing process i use for modifying barley.)

[Nardy]

How does the price of unmalted barley compare to malted barley? I buy my malted barley for $1.50/kg. And that's good quality ale malt.

[maheel]

How does the price of unmalted barley compare to malted barley? I buy my malted barley for $1.50/kg. And that's good quality ale malt.

where and how many KG to get the price ? thats cheap i reckon

[Nardy]

I get it through bulk buys through brisbane brewers. Craftbrewer have it at that price when a whole pallet is sold (quite regularly). I usually buy a couple of 25kg sacks for anywhere between $32-$45 each.

[maheel]

i bought 20kg unmalted for $13 the other day so 65 cents a KG

[Sam.]

If you are in a part of Oz that produce barley, get friendly with a farmer and you could have kilos of raw "malting barley" for fuck all. The amount of grain that gets left on the ground when transferring is amazing....but thats when you have to shoot the roos...... :roll:

[asd]

Hi Swede,

I am a beer maker, based in the U.K., and am very keen to start producing my own malt. I was taken by your "treatise". Is there any chance of a link to your equipment construction thread?

Much appreciated.

Simon.

[bundyftw]

Did Swede forget about this thread?
sounds like he had some usefull information, shame.

[MacStill]

:text-yeahthat:

[Swede]

8-} :laughing-rolling:

Indeed it appears I'd forgotten about this thread. Thanks for PM'ing me about it croweater.

Sorry guys. I was all gung-ho about making malt a while ago, and then got too busy to keep at it. I did successfully malt barley, and had decent conversion from it too. My lack of proper all grain equipment for mashing made me lose interest for the most part, and I kind of slacked off.

I did have a thread going over on artisan distiller about my equipment, http://www.artisan-distiller.net/phpBB3 ... =11&t=4701

One of these days, I'm sure that I'll get back to it and I'll have to pick up this thread again. I can say that I've done it successfully a few times, and if you can get the barley cheap enough it's ok. Just DONT forget to boil the finished wort or you will likely get infections.

Here is a video I did of my system after I built it. The rotary tumbler ended up being useful mostly as a rotary malt floor, and I repurposed an old clothed dryer as a malt kiln.