Crushed Grain Report - How long it keeps

[hoppysailor]

I've seen a lot of threads where people ask how long crushed grain will keep and thought I would share our experience.

We had a little SNAFU with a 100 pound grain purchase a while ago. We were thinking uncrushed. The place we bought it from was thinking crushed. We were more than a little dissapointed to end up with 100 pounds of crushed two row but we didn't want to ruin a relationship with our "new source" so bit our tongues and said thank you. We stored the grain in a dark cool (55-60) place in heavy black plastic bags. Each of the bags was zip tied closed. Over the course of three months we had no spoilage and the beer was still very good. It's possible that the beer would have been better with fresh grain but we didn't notice any issues.

BTW - The next 100 pounds was uncrushed.

 

[Oldsock]

Oxidized malt can cause problems with shelf stability, you may end up with a beers that taste oxidized faster than they would have with fresh crushed malt. You may have also lost some of that "fresh" grainy/bready aroma. Glad to hear you didn't end up with any major issues, sounds like you did a good job with storage.

 

[Jumbo82]

The owner of a local brewery buys all of his malt crushed. I told him I was always a bit leery of buying crushed grain in bulk because I thought it might go bad. He said he once was involved in restarting a brewery that had gone under and hadn't been used in years. When they were opening it up, they found several bags of crushed grains that he says were about 5 years old. They brewed up a batch and it was fine. Now, this story is second hand and I personally never tried the beer, so take it for what its worth. To me it seems like any grain this old is unlikely to be "fine", especially if its already been crushed. I just thought I'd relay this anecdote as an extreme case.