A friend has access to fresh hard white and red wheat grain, other then grinding it for the mash what else would have to be done, does it have to roasted cleaned etc? I'm in the process of building a single tier system, a coworker overheard me talking about it and mentioned what he has access to.
New to all grain
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Is the grain malted? If not you will have to malt it yourself.
chickypad
lupulin shift victim
^ This. See here.
So I've determined that going through the process of achieving malted grain is not something I'm willing to do. I'll work on just being a good brewer of beer, perhaps one day I'll give it a try, but for now ill leave this to the pros.
It is my understanding that the wheat is not required to be malted, but if you do use unmalted wheat that you would need to perform a step mash to achieve the proper conversions in the grain. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I am right.
nukebrewer said:
It would be nice to confirm this, although maulting my own grain would be a neat project, right now I need to focus on brewing good beer with grain that as already had the process done correctly. Malting does not appear to be difficult but very time consuming, you have to be very carful not to allow the grain to get contaminated with mold, then there is he process of drying the grain once it stops growing. As I said I'll leave this up to the professionals.
chickypad
lupulin shift victim
It's not required to be malted - if you mash it with a base grain that is malted, right? The step mashing would help break down proteins and make larger starches available but I'm pretty sure you would still need the enzymes from malted base grain to convert to fermentable sugars.
Edit - Not sure if the wheat also needs to be flaked or torrified to help break it down of if you could just use the step mashing. Maybe someone else can chime in who's done this with raw wehat and what kind of yield you get. On my phone now, can't search to well.
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The problem is you have to gelatinize the starches so that the enzymes from other malted grains can gain access to them. You have to ask yourself 'what is more work?'. Always doing the extra cereal mash (if you are using > 10% unmalted wheat) or just malting the whole batch and then using it as normal malted wheat on brewday.
dbsmith said:
Really I would love to do this, the thought of creating a beer from malting the grains to racking to drinking is really cool, I just don't have what I feel is the correct space to do it correctly. I'm the kind of person that if I can't do it right ill leave it till I can, no use working harder if there is no need to, right?
If this is your first all grain attempt, I would really recommend doing a couple of recipes with 100% malted barley before embarking on anything exotic. Most all-grain brewers will go through their life without ever doing a cereal mash, or trying to malt their own grains.
In addition to the "cereal mash" issue mentioned above, remember that wheat is used sparingly in recipes, so you don't need a lot of wheat. Here are some extra considerations
- you would still need to use malted barley in the recipe, German Wheat Beers use, at most, 70% malted wheat, I suspect that they won't go any further because of lautering challenges, but also that the taste of the end-product will be too tart.
- the only recipes that I've seen which use unmalted wheat are Belgian Wit beers. Usually the wheat has been processed somewhat (torrified or flaked). Unmalted wheat is at most 5% of the recipe, if it is used at all. Some recipes only use a spoon of wheat flour as their "unmalted wheat" ingredient. Wheat (malted and unmalted) would compose up to 40% of the recipe.
- just like using grapes from the supermarket won't yield a good wine, the wheat flour that you get from the supermarket is not the same as brewer's wheat from the LHBS. Strains used by brewers definitely have less protein than normal wheat. Protein causes haze, and inhibits lautering
- examine the wheat for impurities. I quote Eric Warner's book, "Kolsch", here:
"... the total number of red or purple kernels should be less than 3 per 100 grams of malt sample ... discolored kernels are indicative of fungus growth (usually fusarium mycotoxin), which has been strongly correlated to gushing, or the extreme fountaining of beer, when a bottle is opened"
In addition to the "cereal mash" issue mentioned above, remember that wheat is used sparingly in recipes, so you don't need a lot of wheat. Here are some extra considerations
- you would still need to use malted barley in the recipe, German Wheat Beers use, at most, 70% malted wheat, I suspect that they won't go any further because of lautering challenges, but also that the taste of the end-product will be too tart.
- the only recipes that I've seen which use unmalted wheat are Belgian Wit beers. Usually the wheat has been processed somewhat (torrified or flaked). Unmalted wheat is at most 5% of the recipe, if it is used at all. Some recipes only use a spoon of wheat flour as their "unmalted wheat" ingredient. Wheat (malted and unmalted) would compose up to 40% of the recipe.
- just like using grapes from the supermarket won't yield a good wine, the wheat flour that you get from the supermarket is not the same as brewer's wheat from the LHBS. Strains used by brewers definitely have less protein than normal wheat. Protein causes haze, and inhibits lautering
- examine the wheat for impurities. I quote Eric Warner's book, "Kolsch", here:
"... the total number of red or purple kernels should be less than 3 per 100 grams of malt sample ... discolored kernels are indicative of fungus growth (usually fusarium mycotoxin), which has been strongly correlated to gushing, or the extreme fountaining of beer, when a bottle is opened"
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