Strange looking grain/seeds in my 2-row?

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winnph

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So I have been an all-grain brewer for close to a decade, and I feel like I've never seen such a large quantity of weird looking seeds/grain in a bag of grain I bought as this one I recently picked up at a LHBS. Tonight I opened the bag and poured it into the bucket/tub I use for storing 2-row, and I'd say about 1 out of every 100 grains look like these on the right (regular barley on the left for scale):

DSC08506.JPG


So, have I just not been paying attention all this time and is this normal? If so, what are these?

In case you're curious, this is a 50 lb bag of Briess 2-Row Brewer's Malt.

DSC08506.jpg
 
I'd send the package information to Briess along with the picture. Agreed that it looks like wild rice.
 
When you grow grains on the farm, you will see these kinds of kernels. These are kernels that for some reason didn't fill completely and if you process them correctly they will be blown out as they are less dense. Since they are less dense, the heat used to cure the malted grain has darkened the husk. Nothing wrong with them, they will act a lot like rice hulls in your mash.
 
I just thought I'd share the response I got from Briess in case anyone else encounters this:

From: Connie Krebsbach
Date: Fri, May 11, 2012 at 4:46 PM
Subject: RE: BrewingWithBriess.com Customer Inquiry

Hi Winn,

We received your request through our website. I forwarded your email to our production & quality staff and they informed me that this is actually wild oats. Wild oats along with wheat are commonly found in barley fields & are hard to catch in the screen when cleaning the barley. Our spec on wild oats is less than 1%. They also informed me that it won't effect your beer. Thank you for your inquiry & I hope this helped with any concerns you may have had.

Thank You!
Connie/Customer Service
 
1 out of 100 sounds like 1%, not "less than 1%". Never seen such a thing in any of the grain I've bought.
 
Of course if you were an enterprising malt house and somehow were able to remove or screen the " very difficult" wild oats out beyond the 1% spec. Wouldnt it be good business ( read: profit) to be sure that you had as close to 1% wild oats in every sack?

Hypothetically speaking of course.... Jus' sayin'
 
Of course if you were an enterprising malt house and somehow were able to remove or screen the " very difficult" wild oats out beyond the 1% spec. Wouldnt it be good business ( read: profit) to be sure that you had as close to 1% wild oats in every sack?

Hypothetically speaking of course.... Jus' sayin'

That hypothetical idea would mean they would have to regulate the amount of wild oats being grown or purchased just like they would the regular oats to ensure that they always have 1%. I can't see the wild oats as being any cheaper to grow than the regular oats, so I'm not sure if incorporating 1% would even do much for their profit.. I'm thinking their explanation sounds legit. I've been on farms a few times, and they always have a stray plant or two of one type or another...
 
Stauffbier said:
That hypothetical idea would mean they would have to regulate the amount of wild oats being grown or purchased just like they would the regular oats to ensure that they always have 1%. I can't see the wild oats as being any cheaper to grow than the regular oats, so I'm not sure if incorporating 1% would even do much for their profit.. I'm thinking their explanation sounds legit. I've been on farms a few times, and they always have a stray plant or two of one type or another...

Naturally, there is and always will be foreign material of all types in grain from the farm. It's called wild oats for a reason. Farmers do their best to control foreign seeds because it effects the price they get. This hypothetic scenario happens a the malt house that would remove the material and at some point add it back in to maintain an advertised specification in order to maximize profit.

They only have that material as an expense in the sense that it was mixed in with the raw grain that they purchased by the pound for malting

. Then again if that material is included enough it was certainly purchased at a discount.

Beersmith just had a podcast on malting where a popular maltster said their smallest malt house (they have several) does 30000 pounds in a single batch. At a hypothetical dollar a pound, one percent is 300 bucks per batch at how many batches per day per year?

*Edit: understand that I agree that included seeds at this level will negligibly effect the beers we make and that I have little issue that this scenario may be happening, I'm just saying that it's possible that some of the foreign material we see in our 50 pound sack was added to it. I don't blame the maltster for having control. In a way it's reassuring, if there is no impact to me, to know that they have this amount of control over their process.
Incidentally, 30000# is around one railcar. Can you imagine the importance of this if you were a macro brewer?
 
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