Malting barley - "animal feed" barley, useable?

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markowe

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Getting malt in my part of the world is a tad difficult, however, getting big sacks of barley leavings from the combine is not, especially if you promise the driver a liquid commission ;).

Thing is, this barley, though it appears to be two-row (no stalks to be found in the sack, so I can't QUITE be 100% sure), is the type that is intended for animal feed.

So I am guessing that would mean it is higher in protein, but apart from the potential for haze (not the end of the world), is that a problem in and of itself? Would this kind of barley also result in a poorer conversation/extraction?
 

Hmm, thanks, I think I had come across that thread, or at least the article that it quotes. There's no mention though of the issue of using animal feed barley, which is kind of my main question right now... I mean, there is a reason certain types of barley are grown for the brewing industry, right, but I wonder what kind of results can be gained from less-than-optimum barley like mine...
 
There may be no difference between your animal feed and malting barley. Malting barley has to meet standards for plumpness and it ability to sprout. Try sprouting a bunch (100 or 200 seeds in a damp paper towel inside a plastic bar for about a week) and see what percentage of them sprout. If it's over 95% I'd try malting it. You probably will have to screen it to get the weed seeds out.
 
I've malted barley from feed stores without any problems. It may have more protein compared to the stuff grown for beer, but nothing too problematic. I usually use a protein rest with all my home malts anyways.
 
...Malting barley has to meet standards for plumpness and it ability to sprout...

From my very limited knowledge, I thought this was affected by when the barley is harvested. And the effect was on it's moisture content: get it right and you can malt it effectively / get it wrong and you have animal feed.
That is what I took away from the Discoveries Channel's Megafactories program on the Guiness brewery.
 
subscribed to see what I can learn

Just to point out you don't have to post to do that - there is a Subscribe option under Thread tools. Anyway, hopefully I can share something useful once I have done some experiments.

There may be no difference between your animal feed and malting barley. Malting barley has to meet standards for plumpness and it ability to sprout. Try sprouting a bunch (100 or 200 seeds in a damp paper towel inside a plastic bar for about a week) and see what percentage of them sprout. If it's over 95% I'd try malting it. You probably will have to screen it to get the weed seeds out.

I guess you meant plastic bag..? Yeah, you're right, best way is to try. I have taken two cups of grain, washed as much chaff and stalks (found some stalks, yeah, think it's two-row) off as I could. You're right about the weed seeds, gah, there's a bit of what looks like goosegrass, but I'll worry about that later.

Think I will use the "soak for 8 hours, drain for 8 hours, soak again"-type method that gets recommended a lot.

If I get some serviceable malt at the end of it, I will try mashing it and see if I can get an idea of my efficiency. It's a small quantity but should still give me a rough idea if we're talking about 30% or 80%..!
 
From my very limited knowledge, I thought this was affected by when the barley is harvested. And the effect was on it's moisture content: get it right and you can malt it effectively / get it wrong and you have animal feed.
That is what I took away from the Discoveries Channel's Megafactories program on the Guiness brewery.

Saw that program but must have missed that bit. Hmm, I didn't ask the guy who harvested it about that, hadn't heard of that. Not sure why moisture content would make a difference - I mean you are soaking it to get it sprouting anyway, aren't you..?
 
When you harvest grains like barley or wheat it has to be drier than about 13% moisture to store. Lots of times it gets harvested too wet and the grain elevator operators have to dry it using heat which can destroy the sprouting ability making the grain only good for animal feed but most of the time it will be dry enough to store when harvested. That's why you do a germination test. If it got too hot from drying, you can't malt it.

Sometimes when I harvest, my grain is a bit too wet to store but I dry it by aeration without heat. If I can get it dry fast enough that it doesn't mold or heat up by bacterial action it will sprout just fine.
 
Ah, gotcha, yeah, that makes sense.

Well, it didn't rain for 3 months here over the summer, so I hope that it will be fine :). Testing now, so we shall see..! Gonna be a real PITA all round, but quite like the idea of malting my own, so we shall see...
 
Just spitballing ideas here, would it be possible to not malt the barley, but add enzymes seperately during the mash thereby eliminating the chore of malting?

amylase enzyme...$10 / lb ???
http://www.perfectbrewingsupply.com/products/Amylase-Enzyme-%2d-1-lb..html

Well, that's way out of my field of expertise - the whole reason I am planning to malt myself is because I don't have access to a lot of that specialist homebrew stuff..

But you figure with that sort of thing that more people would be doing it if it worked?
 
Unfortunately it's disappeared from the web, but the Craftbrewer Radio podcast out of Australia (anyone remember it) did a multiple part series on home malting grain. And they I know they went into a whole explanation about feed barley, and how to determine if it was maltable or not. I recall some sort of water test, where you added a handful of the grain to water and however it behaved (floating or sunk, but I don't recall which meant which) determined if it was suitable or not.

Someone somwhere might still have the podcast on a harddrive. It was the oldest brewing podcast having started on Australian Radio IIRC back in 2001. There was a ton of great info in the shows and on the website. Graham sanders pulled the plug and took everything down, what 3 years ago? You can find some of the articles on the wayback machine inputting "oz.craftbrewer.org" but I just checked and nothing about the home malting podcasts.
 
Unfortunately it's disappeared from the web, but the Craftbrewer Radio podcast out of Australia (anyone remember it) did a multiple part series on home malting grain. And they I know they went into a whole explanation about feed barley, and how to determine if it was maltable or not. I recall some sort of water test, where you added a handful of the grain to water and however it behaved (floating or sunk, but I don't recall which meant which) determined if it was suitable or not.

Someone somwhere might still have the podcast on a harddrive.

Ooer, never heard of that - my grain sinks like a stone, yet here it says,

Start with a large bucket that can handle the grains plus enough water to float all of the grains. Add water until all of the grains are floating, and let the grains sit in the water for 2 hours.

Errr... ha, mine definitely ain't floating, nowhere near.

However, there might also be some confusion with this:

A simple method of determining the overall level of modification of a batch of malt is by means of the "sinker" test. In this test 50 kernels of malt are shaken into a pan of water. After 10 minutes the number of horizontally floating kernels is counted; undermodified kernels either sink or float vertically in the water. At the very minimum at least 35 or 70% of the kernels should float. With good malt, nearly all of the kernels should float with only two or three kernels sinking or floating vertically.

So something isn't right there, these two texts seem contradictory... Hmm, again, looks like the only way is to try...
 
got plans for the plastic BAR? running into a shortage of plastic.:(


sounds like growing a specific variety is best. Is that feasable?

http://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$department/deptdocs.nsf/all/agdex98

(not sure why it won't link, but copy and paste works)




subscribed (;))
 
Many times there is not a difference between feed barley and malt barley. Generally, Malting Barley sells for a premium. This is especially true when the barley crop is not as good and the barley needed for malting is not in great supply, the brew houses are willing to pay the premium for the better barley. However, in years when all of the barley is good, it is hard for the growers to get the premium price for malt barley. The malting houses buy feed barley -- it is of a quality that meets their malting needs, but they buy it a feed barley prices.

So, the real difference between malt barley and feed barley is price and quality. When the quality of all barley is high, all that is sold is feed barley, and the malt houses use that. When quality is low, the malt houses are willing pay the premium.

Mark
 
Saw that program but must have missed that bit...

Yeah it was the bit where all the tractors a lined up at the gates, and as each one pulls in they take a sample and the have to wait for the results. If it comes back good they dump their barley and get a paycheck, if it is not good they are turned away and sell it as animal feed for a much lower price.
 
Originally Posted by wilserbrewer
Just spitballing ideas here, would it be possible to not malt the barley, but add enzymes seperately during the mash thereby eliminating the chore of malting?

amylase enzyme...$10 / lb ???
http://www.perfectbrewingsupply.com/products/Amylase-Enzyme-%2d-1-lb..html



Well, that's way out of my field of expertise - the whole reason I am planning to malt myself is because I don't have access to a lot of that specialist homebrew stuff..

But you figure with that sort of thing that more people would be doing it if it worked?


Well if people get the "farts" in Serbia, you can likely find Amylase enzyme, we have a product here called Beano. I am bringing this up because home malting barley sounds labor intensive as hell, and I for one would think about alternate methods...or start making wine, cider, or shine if I had to home malt...just my two dinar :mug:
 
Well if people get the "farts" in Serbia, you can likely find Amylase enzyme, we have a product here called Beano. I am bringing this up because home malting barley sounds labor intensive as hell, and I for one would think about alternate methods...or start making wine, cider, or shine if I had to home malt...just my two dinar :mug:

He he, I bet it costs more than 2 dinars to be rid of your gaseous emissions, but I will have to look into that. Maybe someone has experience of that round here though? Mashing with enzymes instead of malting, not farting, I am sure there are all too many experts in that.

From what I have read I get the impression that enzymes are only used to IMPROVE efficiency, not to do the whole job. That would be TOO easy, surely..!

Anyway, once you get the malting process down it's not really a big deal to make small-medium batches of maybe up to 5-10kg which you can store for use in the indefinite future - even in kitchen conditions...
 
Yeah it was the bit where all the tractors a lined up at the gates, and as each one pulls in they take a sample and the have to wait for the results. If it comes back good they dump their barley and get a paycheck, if it is not good they are turned away and sell it as animal feed for a much lower price.

Ohhh....! Yeah! Didn't quite make the connection! Twas an interesting program, to be sure, I was watching and thinking, wait, I UNDERSTAND what they're talking about..! Not that I have ever liked Guiness very much, but that's another matter...
 
Well, only one way to find out... Have done the regular soak, drain, soak, drain and after a couple of days we have some action (pic below). Haven't done a count, but the germination rate seems close to 90%, but rather uneven, like some have really bolted, and some are still just showing the chit, so not sure what's happened there and how that is going to affect things.

20121010_105748_small.jpg
 
wilserbrewer said:
Just spitballing ideas here, would it be possible to not malt the barley, but add enzymes seperately during the mash thereby eliminating the chore of malting?

amylase enzyme...$10 / lb ???
http://www.perfectbrewingsupply.com/products/Amylase-Enzyme-%252d-1-lb..html

Not gonna work because in un-malted barley the endosperm is not modified.... IOW,malting is not only about production of enzymes to convert starch to sugar, but also about breaking down the cell walls in the endosperm so that the starch is accessible to those enzymes (AKA: modification)
 
Not gonna work because in un-malted barley the endosperm is not modified.... IOW,malting is not only about production of enzymes to convert starch to sugar, but also about breaking down the cell walls in the endosperm so that the starch is accessible to those enzymes (AKA: modification)

Could you get around this with the mash schedule, is it the β-Glucanase rest. But again are these enzymes produced during malting and therefore if it is not malted you cannot do this rest anyway?
EDIT: Just noticed I said "mash..." instead of "malt..."
 
mattd2 said:
Could you get around this with the mash schedule, is it the β-Glucanase rest. But again are these enzymes produced during mashing and therefore if it is not mashed you cannot do this rest anyway?

Correct. Giberellic acid is released rom the pericarp and testa which in turn causes the embryo to release the enzymes to Start breaking the cell walls down to allow the amylases to do there work.
In the kernel, these things happen synchronously but do overlap. An under modified malt has fewer amylase enzymes and more cell wall and starch. An over modified malt has many enzymes and the cell walls of the endosperm are broken up and acessable, but less starch as it is starting to be converted that late in the germination.
Generally speaking, a good balance of the two occurs when the rootlets are a little longer than the kernel.
 
OK, it's about the third day, and things are sprouting nicely, my acrospires are about 50% of the length of the grain on average (they need to hit 80-100%), while the roots are getting to be around the length of the grain, or some of them are already much longer, bit uneven really. As to the latter, sources vary, some say that 1x the grain length is about the right rootlet length, others say that the rootlets will be about 1.5 to 2x the length of the grain (depending on the style wished for, too) when full modification is completed. Of course, the acrospires are my main guideline, but I wonder if excessive root growth is indicative of some problem that's going to stop me getting very good modification. I have to say our nightime temperatures here are getting to 5 - 10C, which is quite a bit cooler than the recommended 15C minimum. I wonder if a low temperature can produce this effect. I may move the whole lot inside, because it's nearer 25C indoors which is still supposed to be OK, and may also produce somewhat darker malt, according to some.
 
Just to update on this, I finished malting my barley - about 200g of it, when finished, ha ha. It was just meant to be a little test sample. Brewsmith tells me that's enough for about a litre of beer :D. Actually, I am going to try mashing it to see what kind of efficiency I can get - not sure how accurate the result will be...

In the end I was pretty pleased, probably well over 90% germination rate and actually pretty uniform germination in the end, I think most of the acrospires I checked were within 5% of the target conversion, i.e. close to 100% of the length of the grain.

The proof will be in the brewing, of course (and with a bigger batch), but so far I am quite please with my feed grain!
 
What are you going to mash in? I am thinking acoffee french press would be very well suited for 200g of malt
 
What are you going to mash in? I am thinking acoffee french press would be very well suited for 200g of malt

Heh, I was thinking a Thermos flask actually :D.

Seriously though, it's a ridiculously small amount, but it's just a proof of concept before I scale up. I mean, I have to justify building a malting shed to the missus, right ;)
 
Ooer, never heard of that - my grain sinks like a stone, yet here it says,



Errr... ha, mine definitely ain't floating, nowhere near.

However, there might also be some confusion with this:



So something isn't right there, these two texts seem contradictory... Hmm, again, looks like the only way is to try...

The good barley sinks, floating stuff is non-viable, my experience is here: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f51/happiness-home-malting-107409/

Malt on my friend:mug:
 
Thought someone might like to hear the epilogue to this story, or at least the conclusion of chapter 1:

I decided to get my little handful of malt, grown from the feed barley as per the OP, and brew it up (JUST that grain, no other ingredients except a little hops), just for the hell of it. The amount I had was good for a maximum of a litre of beer, if I wanted any sort of gravity, but I wasn't really interested so much in whether I get beer at the end, as seeing what the efficiency of the entire process is. Yes, brewing up a litre of beer is laughable, but I thought it might at least give me a rough idea of whether I am actually getting anything viable out of this home-malted feed barley.

Well, to cut a long story short, disastrous! My gravity ended up at about 1.017, which according to Brewsmith (as compared to a standard 2-row pale malt) is consistent with an efficiency of about 30% :eek:.

Now I know I can't possibly get any sort of accurate or efficient process with mashing 200g of malt, but still, as a wild ballpark indication, it still doesn't look good.

My guess is that the malting process is mostly to blame (unless I have bungled up a calculation somewhere), since mashing such a small amount ought to be done pretty efficiently - mashing is easy, sparging is easy, you can swoosh the grains around and drain them again, and all sorts. On the flipside, it does get much harder to regulate water temperatures properly...

However, I am thinking that probably the barley isn't THAT suitable to begin with, maybe by virtue of some properties it has that make it more suitable for animal feed. Also, probably inconsistent germination (my fault) leading to under-/over-conversion, too many unviable seeds, too much other crap in there that I couldn't be bothered to pick out.

So I have to rethink this, or else using 3 times more malt for my future AG projects :).

I still pitched some S04 in there to see if I get anything remotely resembling beer - I do actually have a nice sweetish wort that I can sort of imagine as a very weak beer in the not-too-distant future!
 
An additional source for malting is the Alaska Bootleggers Bible by Leon Kania (available on Amazon). It goes into malting barley for home brewing, and it also has some other decent materials on some less than legal activities. I have malted about 50lbs of Alaska 6-row feed barley and have had good results. The barley has lower starch content than good 2-row barley from the mid-west, but I can brew some pretty good beer with it. I just have to add 25-30% more home malted barley to get the same O.G.(decoction may help some with less than perfect modifcation of malt). This still saves money since malted 2-row is $55/50lbs. and Delta 6-row is $10/50lbs. The only problem I had starting off was kilning the barley after it had fully modified. You can make crystal malt in the oven easily, but most ovens don't go low enough to kiln. I solved the problem by getting a Nesco food dehydrator off of craigslist, now I can kiln 4-5lbs at a time at 135-145 degrees.
 
An additional source for malting is the Alaska Bootleggers Bible by Leon Kania (available on Amazon). It goes into malting barley for home brewing, and it also has some other decent materials on some less than legal activities. I have malted about 50lbs of Alaska 6-row feed barley and have had good results. The barley has lower starch content than good 2-row barley from the mid-west, but I can brew some pretty good beer with it. I just have to add 25-30% more home malted barley to get the same O.G.(decoction may help some with less than perfect modifcation of malt). This still saves money since malted 2-row is $55/50lbs. and Delta 6-row is $10/50lbs. The only problem I had starting off was kilning the barley after it had fully modified. You can make crystal malt in the oven easily, but most ovens don't go low enough to kiln. I solved the problem by getting a Nesco food dehydrator off of craigslist, now I can kiln 4-5lbs at a time at 135-145 degrees.

Hey, I wish I had started this whole discussion over on that epic home malting thread.

I tried to track down that book in some electronic form, but may have to buy a "real" book. However, you can get this one on Google Books http://books.google.rs/books?id=s9tf70Wk3bYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false - there are sneaky tricks to download it, not sure of the legality, but it's just easier than reading online.

As for the less than illegal activities, they are legal where I live, but I am not getting into that just yet!

About kilning malt, I have just had a learning experience - my oven does get up to about 35C with the pilot light on, but my 3-4kg of wet malted barley was taking absolutely days to dry out. After reading around, I realised that the initial phase of kilning is really about DRYING the malt, temperature is not so important. So I propped open the oven door a little, got a somewhat lower temperature inside, but the malt dried out a whole lot quicker. Just hope I didn't stew it too much in the meantime. Then I ramped up the temperatures slowly, up to 212F.

Seems there are a LOT of different ideas about the protocol to use! I really need to read up on the subject matter as I need to find the reasons for my poor efficiency.
 
From what I know it is best to keep the temperature while kilning the malt low. If you heat up the barley to above 160 while it is wet you will destroy the enzymes in the barley and it will lose it's diastic properties. Essentially you will be making crystal malt. The reason it was taking so long to dry in the oven was lack of airflow. In the book I referenced he used on old refridgerator with a few incandescent light bulbs in the bottom to heat it and some vent holes top and bottom to allow airflow. Lay some screen on the racks and you have a cheap malt kiln.
 

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