Calling all Maltsters and Roasters!

I just got 50 lbs of raw barley from a fellow brewer/rancher. He's started growing 2-row for brewing, and is malting it himself. I'm also trying my hand at malting, mainly using the Homebrewer's Garden book for instructions. It would be nice to know who else has done this, and with what level of success. I know it's possible and even practical, but there's not much information available. I've seen a few roasting temp charts, but I'd like to know more.

I've malted some gluten free grains but the modification was variable to say the least. If you are going to use the malted grains you'll probably want to do a decoction to get the most out of them.

At least you have a good starting point and plenty of grain to experiment with

:rockin:

I think that with a bit of practice, one could get pretty consistent with it. And I can get 50lbs of raw barley for less than $20, so I figure I may as well experiment!

Now here's a challenge for some of you more computer savvy folks out there. I'd be interested to see if anyone could make a chart detailing drying/roasting temps, times, etc... They exist for everything else. For example, you start with Raw Barley. It can be either roasted raw or malted. Then it would split and you'd have your malted barley that's then roasted after it's dried and your green roasted barleys (Crystals). I've tried this, but I'm pretty dumb when it comes to making charts and images look nice.
Basically, combining a few sources I get this:

Dried, Malted Barley:
Toasted Malt 350* 10-15 minutes
Munich 350* 20 minutes
Vienna 215*-225* 3 hours
Black Patent 350* 1 hr 20 min

Using the book The Homebrewer's Garden, as well as these two sites, Bodensatz, and Sanders
One should be able to create something a little more comprehensive.

Any takers?

I made a spreadsheet based on what I could piece together from internet resources. The processes may need to be adjusted for temps in home ovens with racks instead of professional drums. It's available here:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/spr...wGqO5dFljcFFObUhrWEE5QzFkNTlxZWJxTkE&hl=en_US

This sort of thing fascinates me. While raw barley isn't easy to acquire around here, I wonder what the possibilities of roasting malted grain could be. For example, could I buy a 50lbs bag of pilsner and roast 5lbs of it into munich or vienna? Do any of you do it? Has it been done?

It is possible. For my last batch I malted 25 pounds of feed store barley (a 50 lb. bag here is $16.95 vs. 2-row at $36.95) and roasted some of it to be caramel malt. I also roasted previously malted 2-row to be chocolate and some of the raw feed barley into roast barley. We just brewed with it this weekend. The color was good (it was a stout), and we hit very close to our original gravity. Roasting specialty grains was the easiest part. Drying the malted grain is harder because it takes a lot of space and/or energy. From now on, my plan is to roast my own specialty grains from 2-row we buy (malting my own only saves about $1.20 per batch). Fresher specialty grains smell better and roasting at home is fun and easy. It's important to keep your base malt in an air-tight container though. If you roast with moisture content above 5%, they'll pop like popcorn, which makes them torrified and isn't quite what you're going for.

I've malted 2,2 pounds of wheat once to make smoked wheat malt which I used in grodziskie beer as 1/3 of grain bill addition. I partially succeeded cause in attempted mash with 2 ounces of my malt the iodine test turn out negative after one hour of mashing! Too long to call it perfect malt...
Personally I don't see much sense in malting base malts on my own. It costs me too much work and time to think seriously about it and the final product turn out to be rather ordinary. If some day I will have possibilty to buy commercial smoked wheat malt I'll never play the malster game again