Can I brew with this wheat?

[totland]

I am in the process of cleaning out my moms basement and found a whole lot of food storage. There is buckets of whole wheat, cracked wheat, and oatmeal.

I have this far been a extract brewer but am planing on venturing into all grain small batch brews.

So my question is can I malt this wheat or add the cracked wheat or oatmeal into my recipe?

Thank you in advance for any help you guys can give me!

 

[RM-MN]

Malting grain is a sprouting operation and your whole wheat *might* sprout but the cracked wheat and oatmeal will not. However, the malting process is to get the grains to release enzymes and malted barley that you would buy has those enzymes and usually an excess of them so you can use the unmalted wheat and oatmeal and the enzymes from the barley will convert the starch to sugars.

Most of us use pale malt for out base malt and it has sufficient enzymes to convert its own starches and so much left over that it can convert about twice its weight in wheat starch. If you replace the pale malt with Munich malt, then it doesn't have much left over to convert anything else.

Before you get too excited about the wheat and oatmeal for your brewing, smell test them. If they smell fresh, taste them. If they taste fine, use them. Sometimes they will get a stale odor or taste and you wouldn't want to brew with them then.

 

[totland]

Ok that makes sense. Thank you for the info !