grow your own barley?

[mainbutter]

Brewing has been going great! I'm so glad I made room for some small fermenters and was able to successfully get sufficient volume boils to do some small batches.

The downtime between brew and bottle days has gotten me just thinking about where to go next with recipes and general brewing of stuff..

My question of the day:

Where do I go to learn about growing barley at a hobbyist level and malting at home? I could probably steal a portion of our 10'x10' community garden plot from my wife, but not sure how much square footage I need to produce X amount of barley.

Thanks for any pointers!

 

[Kent88]

Where about do you live? Can you look up the bushels per acre that farmers get for barley or other grains in your area? Perhaps some USDA website or something connected to your local college/university with Production Agriculture programs could help you with those numbers?

I haven't read this book myself (its on my wish list), but I bet you'd find it interesting Malt: A Practical Guide from Field to Brewhouse.

If you're going for a base malt you're going to need more than a portion of a 10x10 garden. Maybe you could get enough for some specialty grains.

Best of luck with it. Be sure to follow up with some results.

 

[RM-MN]

Growing barley as a hobby sounds like fun but your garden space probably isn't big enough to justify planting barley for your brewing. You probably can expect 100 bushels per acre which sound great but an acre is 43560 square feet while your entire 10 x 10 garden nets you 100 square feet. One thing to consider if you want to use what you grow is that malted barley contains the enzymes necessary to convert nearly 3 times its weight in unmalted grain so you could mill some of yours to add to a batch just to say it contains your home grown barley.

 

[bajaedition]

sounds fun, just the learning curb on turning it to malt would be pretty steep