Malting barley.

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Orfy

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I know there's been the odd post in the past when people usually forum outside Europe and America have asked about barley production but It's never got passed a few posts.

I'm thinking about planting enough barley to make malt for 2 gallons of beer. When I get time I'll need to work out via backward calculating how much space and plants I'm going to need. I want to make a gallon of beer with the ingredients I've grown. I'm even considering fining a spring I can take the water from rather than using tap water.
I'm considering compromising on two things because I don't want to risk losing a batch with so much time efffort and energy invested in it.
I may use a sanitiser and will most likeley use a comercial yeast.
If any one has any thoughts or information to input it would be appreciated.

First step is doing some rersearch on growing barley and figuring out how much I need and when it needs to go in the ground.
 
Homebrewers Garden provides some process on home malting, IIRC, they suggest a 10x10 plot for enough grain to make a 5 gallon (moderate gravity) batch.
 
I may use a sanitiser and will most likeley use a comercial yeast.
.



Just use yeast you cultured from a batch (with commercial yeast), then you grew the yeast yourself! And I would use sanitizer, it is not part of the beer so it shouldn't count in "made from all my own grown ingredients"
 
Sounds like quite the endeavor. Good luck and godspeed. Getting wild yeast and slowly evolving it from generation to generation, while possible, would be a gigantic pain in the @$$. I don't think anyone will judge you. And I agree, commercial sanitizer is perfectly kosher. Strictly speaking, you could blow your own glass carboy too, but at some point its over done.
 
Sounds like quite the endeavor. Good luck and godspeed. Getting wild yeast and slowly evolving it from generation to generation, while possible, would be a gigantic pain in the @$$. I don't think anyone will judge you. And I agree, commercial sanitizer is perfectly kosher. Strictly speaking, you could blow your own glass carboy too, but at some point its over done.

Hey, let's not get too personal here...

Good luck, dude. This is something that I've thought about now and again, but it just seems like way too much work. I'd rather use that 10x10 space for something better.
 
I'd use spring water before I used rainwater -- rainwater is essentiall distilled and will have no minerals. I would consider harvesting some wild yeast though. It would be fun to know that you had grown/captured everything that went into the beer. I've been reading a bit about capturing yeast lately and it seems simple enough. Mix up some DME and agar then pour it into a petrie dish. Sit the dish outside for a few hours then close it up and incubate it. When you get a few yeast colonies, take one off the plate and put it into a very small amount of wort. Step it up a few times and it'll be ready to pitch. Or you could go through several generations of starters, selecting only the flocculant yeast from each batch, in order to get the characteristics you want out of it.
 
I think I'm going to contact a malting house and see f they'll let me have some unmalted barley to use for seed.

I went to the local feed and seed and picked up a bag of rye that was guaranteed for 95% germination for 12 bucks. If you are in the proper season the stuff isn't hard to find. Pretty sure the planting time for summer barley is right about now...
 
Ive got a similar project in the works. I planted some winter rye this fall and it started sprouting recently. I haven't decided if im going to malt it or not as I have read some warnings about rye and oats growing harmful bacteria during malting.

+1 on reading the homebrewers garden, its not a textbook but it offers some good advice on a range of topics, malting every grain you can think of, growing hops, various herbs that can be used in brew including their flavor contributions and preservative/medicinal effects.
 
Barley yields can run from 3500 kg/ha to double that. Barley used to be grown around here, but since the farmers can't burn the slash any more, the mildews and rusts make it impossible. Unfortunate as OSU is one of the top research universities for barley. On the other hand, OSU is probably an ideal place to develop rust & mildew resistant winter malting barleys.
 
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