article about brewing with raw barley

anyone heard of ondea pro? apparently its an enzyme you can add to raw barley that mimics the malting process.

http://www.good.is/post/the-secret-to-cheaper-greener-local-beer/

 

Never hear of the name-brand, but many people use alpha enzyme on occasion.

 

I do not really understand how this would work.

The grain is germinated then stopped at a certain point. This is what makes the "starch" sugars. The sugars are then broken down by the enzymes in the mash at specific temps to produce a desired frementable/unfermentable sugars into the wort.

I am not saying this won't work, just that I do not understand how this miracle enzyme can break down sugars that are not present due to lack of malting...

IF this does what it claims you could potentially buy/use any dried raw grain.

All that still does not answer the most important question "What does beer made this way taste like?"

 

yea i was hoping someone on here may have used it before. im also curious how much taste difference there is. here is a link to their site, but it doesnt give much info:

http://www.ondeabrewing.com/en/Pages/default.aspx

 

I am on a tasting panel for Canadian Malt Barley Technical Centre (CMBTC) and have used this process on the panels. It does work. 100% raw barley turned into fermentable wort. There is a noticeable taste difference at 100% raw barley, but blended down, the taste got more like normal beer. At 40% raw/60% malt the taste was very drinkable, much the same as BMC (which is what it was shooting for).

 

I am sorry but exogenous enzymes sounds too much like genetically engineered for my tastes. I want to move closer to an entirely home made process not further from it. Closer to the earth and more local and sustainable.

 

Malting obviously does not add anything like sugars to the grain--it just alters what is there. It is not unthinkable that a synthetic chemical might be obtained that would do something similar to what the chemical already in the grain would do under certain conditions.

From The Source of All Knowledge: Malting grains develops the enzymes required to modify the grain's starches into sugars.

Malting develops these enzymes naturally. This product is an enzyme that probably acts very similar to the natural enzymes, that is, they both break down starch into sugar. I am pretty sure malting doesn't convert starch to sugar, but gets the enzymes ready to do so. That's why we talk about mash conversion, and why wort doesn't taste sweet until it's converted.

 

00ps