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On Thursday I'm going to roast my barley. This means that I'm going to need to finalize my recipe, so I've been trying to do that today. I want a chocolate-y stout with a smooth, viscous mouthfeel. I also want to keep it relatively simple,since this is my first time. To that end, I'm going...

By the way, here is my barley patch: It hasn't seemed to have grown much in the last few weeks. We had the lightest of frosts a few weeks back (which I was assured it would not be bothered by), and temperatures haven't fallen below 45 F since then. It seems healthy now. I'm not really...

It's nice of you to say, Passed. I've received so much inspiration and information from this thread, I'm happy to have something to contribute now. As to scaling up my malting, the only problem there is drying. My dehydrator only has room for about 4-5 pounds of expanded barley (with the...

My second batch of six pounds is dry! It germinated for three days at about 65 F in 60% humidity, being spayed with water and mixed about four times a day.

The first six-pound batch of barley is dried, so the second batch has begun! This morning I finally cleaned out the two buckets with bleach and lots of rinsing, re-weighed the inner container, and added six pounds of raw barley to it. I rinsed it with water, then filled the bucket with water...

Barley in the dehydrator at the 24 hour mark: The dehydrator and oven (powered by light) containing all the barley: It's all been at 95 F (the oven), 104 F (top rack of dehydrator), or 100 (bottom of dehydrator) for a day now. The rootlets are small and brittle. I'll need to build mesh...

You'd think, but apparently it's an independent gene, according to the guy in that podcast. In other news, I checked the barley late last night and was surprised to find that nearly 1/5 of the kernals had acrospires bursting from the hulls, and the grain temperature was 79F. The germination...

At the 48 hour mark the acrospire length is 60%, plus or minus less than 10%. The rootlets are double or triple the kernal length. The hulls are soft and yield with the kernal without cracking hardley. The rootlets are getting quite entangled, almost forming mats. The volume of the seeds have...

Here's a Beersmith podcast on the subject of barley genetics: http://beersmith.com/blog/2015/10/29/barley-varieties-and-genetics-with-dr-pat-hayes-beersmith-podcast-114/ These are pretty decent podcasts. The barley that Europeans used of malting has mainly been two-row. It's a bit like the...

Passed, the barley is still on day 1 of germinating after soaking yesterday, so I'll have to wait 1-5 more days until the acrospire has gotten to be 75-100% of the length of the grain. It's maybe 25% right now. So you're right that they need more time to grow. Little roots bud out of the...

I'm very pleased at how things are going, but the truth is I'll be a little nervous until I put the barley in the dehydrator to dry. I'm worried that the temp in the bar is too high, or that the seeds will dry out, or get moldy. I'm pretty sure I'm being a worry-wart, since I've read of folks...

I let the barley soak for 8 hours yesterday, then drained it and let it sit for about 4 more. I replaced the water and started a second soak, with more ice this time and started at ~65 F. The bar room was 70 F, which is a good 5 degrees more than it's been this past month despite cooler weather...

Paps, I'm not sure. The plants get about three feet tall, and you get around 10-15 pounds of barley per 100 square feet. Could you make hydroponics that large?

Besides the barley I'' malting, I did some work on the barley I'm growing. Yesterday I noticed that there were bare spots in my barley patch, so I went out and filled it in a bit. I used a screw driver to put holes in the grown, set a seed in each, and covered them up again snugly. I put down...

It's time to start malting! I had a look at the food dehydrator that I borrowed, and I could only fit about 2 pounds of barley on each of the 4 trays it comes with. That means that 8 pounds per malting batch would be pushing what I could dry in one go, so I decided to start with a 6 pound batch...

Thanks, Passed! Colo is definitely a big reason that I'm even trying this. There are so many naysayers, and this thread he started is brimming with solutions and encouragement. I'm going out of town this weekend, to Leavenworth's Oktoberfest. When I get back I'm going to buy an air stone and a...

Aaaaaaand I've got barley coming up! I'm so excited! This is day 5, when emergence is expected based on the charts resulting from a google image search for "winter barley growth". There aren't very many of them yet, maybe a fifth of the 25 per square foot, so I'll plant some more by hand on...

I got the soil test back on Thursday, and calculated that I needed to add about 1/3 lb of phosphorous, 1/10 lbs of both nitrogen and potassium in my 200 square foot patch. I found an organic fertilizer that had the ratios of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, and bought two bags. I...

My barley came today! 25 pounds of winter malting barley from the breeding program at University of Idaho, specially tailored for our climate. I didn't get the test results, though, so I'll have to wait until the weekend to plant, since my next few nights are busy. I can't wait!

Good question, Don. He uses weed and feed frequently, so I'll have to ask home to watch out when he applies it. We are planning on building a fence soon, so it will only be a temporary problem.