Home malting, wiki bound

Williams 728
Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Poindexter

Poindexter

Well-Known Member
Joined
Oct 1, 2007
Messages
1,195
Reaction score
9
Location
interior Alaska
Please to chip in with "other stuff" that should be in the wiki.

So far for references:

Bodensatz: http://www.bodensatz.com/upage/index.php?page=kiwibrewer_malting

BT: http://brewingtechniques.com/library/backissues/issue1.1/fix.html

BYO: http://byo.com/feature/284.html

India Food Science: http://www.unu.edu/unupress/food/8F103e/8F103E08.htm

Custom Lab: http://www.customlab.co.uk/

a damn .pdf for e-geeks: http://freescale.com/files/microcontrollers/doc/app_note/AN3414.pdf

wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_malt#Pale_malt

and Thomas Moser: http://www.tmoser.ch/typo3/16.0.html

With respect to all of the above, the first thing to do is soak your maltable seeds in water until they got lots of water inside, but without drowning them.

Once they are filled up with water, put them in a pile called a couch. The next step is germination. When you can see the little white thing sticking out one end the seeds have germinated.

When your seeds have germinated take them out of the couch and spread them on a floor. Turn "frequently" and keep the seeds moist.

When the acrospire is the same length as the seed (at least for barley) what you have now is "green malt" that is ready to be kilned.

Setup:
[YOUTUBE]vl9H1tjuU0s[/YOUTUBE]



Half "mast" with bacehelor talk at 03:18 and up:

[YOUTUBE]Pz3wa-Xolg0[/YOUTUBE]

Once I get the rootlets loose I'll brew and close out the series with a pint...what else goes in the wiki?
 
Looking good Poindexter. You are inspiring me to give it a try. Just got my rhizomes. I think an all home grown beer is in my future. Maybe I can trade you some malt for some more barley.
 
good job, I like that.

Looks like the recent spike in hop growing also started a decent size grow-your-own movement.

Kai
 
I wonder if the pillow case cushions the malt a bit too much. Maybe if you put something solid (but not heavy so you don't crush the grains) in there with the malt it would take off the rootlets a bit more efficiently.

Great videos!
 
Awesome P-dex, I really want to hear how it brews up, lol. If you can make this work relatively consistent, then there is no reason not to grow your own and malt it. Of course I would require a lot of space for barley, lol. Until then, I guess I'll just keep buying bags. This really is cool. Oh, I brewed another batch under pressure with a triple decoction, wow. This home malting would be a great thing to try with my house ale due to its simple recipe, so please keep us informed. Great article so far, I need to get some of my stuff on the Wiki.
 
For now those rootlets are stuck on there but good. If I hold one grain between thumb and forefinger it is three or four twists to get the rootlet loose, sorta like the stem of an apple.

But a couple of the references say to let freshly roasted grains "waft" for "a couple" weeks before brewing. I think that applies mostly to darker roasts, but so far mine have been "wafting" for about 24 hours. The house smells nice today.

Also I started with 16.0 ounces of grain, soaked that up to 1 pound 11.2 ounces at the front end. I sampled a bunch of grains along the way, feeling the mealy/ steely thing on my teeth, cutting them open to see the acrospire, what I have left still weighs 17 ounces.

I bet the rootlets come off easier when the grain is done drying back out.

RDWHAHB.
 
Revvy said:
Wow!!! So what happened with removing the rootlets? DId you get them all seperated.
Click to expand...

Not yet. See post above this one. I don't want to roast the grain any darker than it already is, but I also want to get it dried out before anything starts growing in it... I may go with a thin layer in the oven tommorrow night.

Revvy said:
Are their more vids coming soon?
Click to expand...

I think the next logical steps will be after I buy the camera I am taking to Alaska with me next month. I am finally going to get a digital SLR or DSLR (D80) so I can use all my real camera lenses again.

With those I can get clear pictures of but not have to develop film for:

1. The wee-Willy white thing that sticks out the end of a germinated grain -> time to move from couch to floor

2. Rootlet hairs on grains in couch.

3. Grains cut open with visible acrospire. In real life the acrospire is green, really neat.

4. I can _see_ the difference between mealy and steely with my eyes, but it will be very difficult to light properly to photograph. I'll spend some time on it.
 
fifelee said:
Looking good Poindexter. You are inspiring me to give it a try. Just got my rhizomes. I think an all home grown beer is in my future. Maybe I can trade you some malt for some more barley.
Click to expand...

I am working toward this as well ;)

I think the biggest time involvement for small scale is threshing. Malting can be as simple as germinating and drying in the sun on a tarp protected from birds.
 
First, it has been hot enough in Dallas to be running my central air conditioner for
the last 48 hours. I have the grain spread out on a table in a thin layer.

Presumably the grain is drying out further 2° to the dehumidified air. I doknwothe grain weighs less now than it did two days ago, and the rootlets come off more
easily.

I do have a 2 pound batch of "pale malt" going in the dryer on the fluff/ low temp thing. It looks like I got the growth stopped yesterday, but at this rate the stuff is never gonna dry out....keeping it spread out near an AC vent most of the time also.

IIRC one acre is a square 128x128 feet. I kinda wonder how many square feet of garden space would yield like maybe ten pounds of grain. I am far enough in to this project that I might continue to mess around with specialty grains, but I don't see any point in trying tomake all my own pale malt, it is a pain in the neck.

Not only is it a pain in the neck, but Briess is really good stuff.
 
Poindexter said:
First, it has been hot enough in Dallas to be running my central air conditioner for
the last 48 hours. I have the grain spread out on a table in a thin layer.

Presumably the grain is drying out further 2° to the dehumidified air. I doknwothe grain weighs less now than it did two days ago, and the rootlets come off more
easily.

I do have a 2 pound batch of "pale malt" going in the dryer on the fluff/ low temp thing. It looks like I got the growth stopped yesterday, but at this rate the stuff is never gonna dry out....keeping it spread out near an AC vent most of the time also.

IIRC one acre is a square 128x128 feet. I kinda wonder how many square feet of garden space would yield like maybe ten pounds of grain. I am far enough in to this project that I might continue to mess around with specialty grains, but I don't see any point in trying tomake all my own pale malt, it is a pain in the neck.

Not only is it a pain in the neck, but Briess is really good stuff.
Click to expand...

One acre is 208x208 feet. It is roughly the size of a football field. A good irrigated field should make 5000lbs per acre. Not sure how that would translate to a garden. If a garden does yield the same as a field then a 10x10 plot would yield about 11lbs.
 
Wow all this home Malting has given me lots of ideas. My freinds dad is a farmer in Manitoba and he grows a lot of cereals. I have arranged for him to get me a few buckets of the beer cereals. Now to find good recipies for Hefeweizen and the likes. Thanks for all the great info I will let you all know how this turns out. Now if I can only convince him to spare an acre for hops!
 
Wing Nut said:
Wow all this home Malting has given me lots of ideas. My freinds dad is a farmer in Manitoba and he grows a lot of cereals. I have arranged for him to get me a few buckets of the beer cereals. Now to find good recipies for Hefeweizen and the likes. Thanks for all the great info I will let you all know how this turns out. Now if I can only convince him to spare an acre for hops!
Click to expand...

I am looking for maltable oats if you get a hook-up. How about some 10L crystal oats?

Another vid coming soon. I just finished "making" four pounds of pale 2 row, I about to turn some of that into Munich, and I saw corn on the cob in the grocery this AM, so there is a Miller un-clone in my near future.
 
InkBird 300

Latest posts

Back
Top