1 year out of date grain?

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scrawbag

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i got my hands on 30 kg of grain and a load of hops and they are all at least a year out of date.
are they ok to use? ill be doing my first all grain with these
 
Grains have better shelf life than hops. Do you know how they have been stored? Un milled pale two row has a best used within a year. Its not bad at the end of a year. It is past prime after 12 months. Roasted grains have an even longer shelf life than pale.
 
some of the hops vacumed sealed bags are opened and some are still sealed.
they were stored in a box in a shead. not ideal.
it's past prime alright but should i bother using it at all?
as its my first try at allgrain i think ill do it anyway to get my technique down
 
Taste the grain first. If it has a stale or other off flavors, dont waste your time. Barley should taste well nutty, malty, grainy with some tannin's from the husk. Your extraction rate might be a tad lower too. The hops are a bigger crap shot due to time and temps. Sealed bags might be ok. Give them a smell, they should be very hoppy opening. You could bring them by someone with brewing experience and get a better opinion. Good Luck scrawbag
 
thanks jerseyjoe. ill use my nose to guide me and do a little taste test. i should know what barley taste like i have harvested it enough times.
 
My guess is that the malt and hops will brew up fine...the hops may have lost some bittering, so I would not be afraid to be a bit heavyhanded...but then again I like hops.
 
Is the grain crushed? If so, it's probably stale, but if not it's perfectly fine to use. I would imagine all of the hops that are sealed are good to use (may have lost some bitterness) and all of the hops that were opened are totally bad.
 
some of the grain is not crushed so ill definately use that. i think any hops than have a pungent enough smell will get used.
i think ill brew a practice run tomorrow using the crushed grain to use it up and learn how to do a partial mash. i have an electric boiler i have to figure out how to use.
 
as an update for all those who see this in the future. i made a stout with the out of date grain and when i bottled it it tasted terrible. a horrible twang to it that tasted like what i imagined an infection would taste like. so a few months passed and this weekend i went to dump it down the sink and thankfully i poured the first and tasted it. holy cr*p the horrible twang was gone. got pissed on a few of them. no nasty side effects. once again RDWAHAHB. works every time
 
I would go ahead and use it for a Frankenstein/Who cares brew!? Don't expect much from it and you just might end up with something good. Hell, if you don't want it, shoot it my way and I'll get it brewed up.

HAHA GL!
 
I brewed a Hefeweizen this spring with 10 year old (yep - ten!) wheat, and it turned out great! Uncrushed grains keep for a long time as long as they are kept dry...
 
As an experiment, (that’s what I call it now – but I was just perpetually lazy), I left a bag of grain that was already crushed from the shop, hops, and a packet of 05 in the bottom of the garage fridge for just under 2 YEARS! The grain lost like 30% of it’s weight – which totally shocked me; presumably moisture – and I was fully expecting to have zero start with dead yeast but that sucker took off within hours and turned out very good; about on par for what I was doing before fermentation temp control and huge starters.

I did a similar “experiment”, for 18months: but the Wyeast was completely dead.

(This hints sharply to why "I've been brewing for over 20 years" but still suck! :D

However, for posterity, I have ZERO pause for ingredients going wonky over time – except for liquid yeast!
 
a stout is great to cover up any nasty little flavours so ill brew a few batches of stout. plenty of roast and a few months itll be grand. im still working on my recipe so a few free brews will be good
 
a year later. basically most of the grain went to feed chickens. if your grain is chrushed and its that far out of date, dump it
live and learn
 
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