What should I do? is my malt dead?

[Climb]

I am wondering if there is wheat mixed in with some barley. I know that the barely that I have grown is almost impossible to de-hull. Where as, wheat come out of its hull rather easily.
I agree with bracconiere, in that 8 hour soaks are way to long. Attached are notes that I have used for malting, kilning and roasting barely and wheat. I hope this is useful to others. I hope the txt format is ok. I am unable to save the file as a pdf on this machine.

 

[bracconiere]

yeah my oven only goes as low as 170 also..

i found my oven when set to 170f, actually is going to 200f...so it makes munich malt, and dark munich at that. it converts fine, but it's hard to make much besides make black beer with it...when it starts balck, can't really remove black....


my solution was a 200ohm resistor on the oven temp probe, and a toggle switch.

so if i throw that switch to low mode, my oven will go all the way down to 95f if i want it to, and i set it to like 280f, and it's actually like 160f in the oven....

 

[bracconiere]

oh, and a box fan blowing cool air over it will dry it plenty enough for kilning in a day or two.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/114358740472?hash=item1aa04fe5f8:g:zLAAAOSw8DZfOEvh
just spread the malt out on 3 of them stacked, and let the fan blow over them. wait until the kernels are hard to the squeeze...

but i'm getting ahead of the game on that, we still need to work on your sprouting technique!

 

[lurker18]

Polishfarmer, there is no question that is hulless barley. Still can brew with it, but it will be terrible underwhelming, thin beer. Need the tannins from the husk to give it a real beer flavor.

I don't understand why the home maltsters start off with bad ingredients. The very first line of this post says it is feed barley, ie meant for the cows to eat, not make malt out of. Many feed barley varieties need to freeze before they will ever start growing, they have a dormancy bread into them. Also, the DP of feed barley is very low, even malted out, it may not convert all the starches to sugar.

Next time, get a malting variety and use the product as they were meant to be used.

 

[bracconiere]

Polishfarmer, there is no question that is hulless barley. Still can brew with it, but it will be terrible underwhelming, thin beer. Need the tannins from the husk to give it a real beer flavor.

I don't understand why the home maltsters start off with bad ingredients. The very first line of this post says it is feed barley, ie meant for the cows to eat, not make malt out of. Many feed barley varieties need to freeze before they will ever start growing, they have a dormancy bread into them. Also, the DP of feed barley is very low, even malted out, it may not convert all the starches to sugar.

Next time, get a malting variety and use the product as they were meant to be used.

it'd work fine, he drowned it....i can convert damn near 50% adjuncts with feed barley.....the huskless part might be a problem without "garden store" rice hulls though!!

 

[lurker18]

But your feed barley may not actually be a feed variety. There are some varieties that are from the start not meant to make malt from, most hulless varieties are in this group. A very high percentage of feed barley is made of varieties that did not make malt due to several quality factors, high protein, light weight, thin, etc. You make be lucky and are getting those. Without knowing the barley variety, it is often very difficult to tell if it an actual feed variety, a rejected malt variety, a variety that used to be accepted but has fallen out of fashion, etc.

And an 8 hour soak on a hulled variety is not uncommon, most commercial malt houses are closer to 12 hours on the soak, 13 hour air rest, do that 3 times. They are also professionals at it so they do have better control than home malting.