Non malted grains

[michaellindopp]

Hey all, thinking of making a brew bur not to use any malted grains. I want to use just wheat and some oats to make a wheat beer. I'll probably have to do a triple decoction. I'll have a yeast starter ready, cold crash it & siphon the alcohol water off it and start it fermenting again with the wort. I was even thinking about gyle/krausen priming the beer and the end. I want to go all in but want peoples opinions on this. If you got any thoughts let me know.
All opinions are welcome. Cheers.

 

[JimRausch]

Sorry, but using unmalted wheat and oats, with no source of enzyme activity(that's what the malted grains give you) will give you a starchy mess with no fermentable sugars. If you don't have a source of malted grains, you can add an artificial source of amylase, but I think that would be harder to find.

 

[specharka]

Hey all, thinking of making a brew bur not to use any malted grains. I want to use just wheat and some oats to make a wheat beer. I'll probably have to do a triple decoction. I'll have a yeast starter ready, cold crash it & siphon the alcohol water off it and start it fermenting again with the wort. I was even thinking about gyle/krausen priming the beer and the end. I want to go all in but want peoples opinions on this. If you got any thoughts let me know.
All opinions are welcome. Cheers.

There will not be enough diastatic (enzymatic conversion) power available to convert the available starches into sugars. There are options to address this, one of which is to add amylase to the mash. However, this will invariably change the character of the beer, and it is much easier to just rely on malted grains (including malted wheat) to accomplish starch conversion.

Just use 30-50% two-row malt and a longer mash and you should get full starch conversion.

 

[michaellindopp]

Makes sense. I read a lot about this. But what did people do many years ago before malted barley or did they always have malted barley in beer. Or was beer/alcohol always made through malted products?