Raw vs. Flaked Barley

I've been having problems with getting enough body in my beers. The numbers all come out right, but it just doesn't have the fullness or mouth feel I'd like. I've been reading about using unmalted barley, mainly flaked. I have a 50lb bag of raw barley. Can I just mill it fine and use that instead? What would be the difference?

I understand that it will add some haze, but I'd rather have delicious beer than clear beer!

You'll need to do a cereal mash. You can mill the barley first, then cook it in some boiling water just like you were cooking it to eat. After it's cooked all the way through, then it's ready to be added to your mash with all the rest of your grains. The cereal mash makes the starches soluble, the beer mash converts them to sugars. Of course, it's ,much easier to use flaked barley because the hot rollers that make the flaked barley make the starches soluble, and therefore you don't need to do the cereal mash.

This is the same process that's used if you use Old-Fashioned Oats. If you use Quick Oats, you've got a flaked grain & don't need to do the cereal mash.

Thanks! Sounds easy enough. Does anyone have any idea of how much I should add for an ale? As I said, I'm not worried about the haze. I'm thinking 10%. Any thoughts?

Half pound to a pound is great for most ales. In my Irish, Guiness-style stout,
I use 2 lbs.

looking for advice on using raw barley..

the poster recommends boiling to get it ready to add to the mash, could i bake it in the oven for a time instead? maybe like 20 minutes at 200degrees celsius?

Boiling to help gelatinize would be helpful. The starches in raw barley would be less accessible if they aren't gelatinized. Baking the malt doesn't gelatinize the starch. You have to have water in the kernel.

Be very careful with how much is added to the total grist. Flaked barley and raw barley have a distinctive taste in my opinion. It's relatively masked in a beer like a stout, but when you have a lighter flavored beer, the taste is notable and not desirable. In addition, the beta glucans that you add to the wort are very effective body producers. Even at very low concentrations. The problem with that is that when you pour a beer like that, the head is HUGE and doesn't fall very fast. For a commercial beer, that would be disaster. The bars would be unable to produce a good pour out of the tap.

You may ask, what about Guinness and its head? That beer is thinned by its low mash pH and the raw barley they add helps boost that back up to beyond a normal all malt body. However, the modest 'carbonation' provided by the nitrogen is very fine and not very effervescent. That allows a bartender to serve that beer in a reasonable amount of time. But, you may be aware that a proper Guinness pour demands a 2-step pour and some waiting. Big chewy body is not always a good thing.

While a stout might have 5 percent, I find that milder flavored beers need no more than about 1/2 percent to produce the intended body-building effect.

Enjoy!

excellent, thanks a lot. i will do a gelatinization boil when i use it!

also, now reading your brewing water page in your signature.