Wheat vs Barley for malting

[Nebraskan]

Just curious as to why barley and it seems 2 row is more preferred, for making beer over the malting of wheat? Wheat is cleaner without the husks in the way, and seem like it would be the preferred grain since harvesting makes it so much cleaner. I grew up on a farm that raised hard red winter wheat back in NW Nebraska.

Also has anyone ever malted oats to make into an oat beer? I see recipes for adding flakes oats to add body to beer, but nothing about using 100% oats that have been malted.

 

[RM-MN]

The conventional mash tun requires something to form a filter for draining the wort. That was found to be present in barley as barley has hulls to form the filter where wheat does not. 2 row has less protein than 6 row and since protein can form "chill haze" one might prefer the 2 row.

Wheat has no hull so it becomes a very difficult grain to use in a mash tun which was a standard method of mashing for centuries. Then came the invention of plastics which evolved into fabrics and finally into filter bags. Now we can use the malted wheat or rye which also has no hull and use the huge filter area of a filter bag instead of relying on the hull for a filter bed. Wheat and rye are still pretty sticky by themselves so we usually use a portion of our mash as barley to keep from getting such a stick mash.

 

[Nebraskan]

What you're saying makes sense, since at the winery we add bags of rice hulls to the press as a pressing agent to help with extracting more juice. I have access to LOTS of rice hulls. This video : [ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuIKHC57ROQ[/ame] shows how to build a mash tun out of a common 48 quart chest cooler. With the SS screen that would be most helplful, as well as using some rice hulls mixed in with the malted wheat.

There are different kinds of wheat. Bread making requires good amount of wheat protein called Gluten. It is the "gummy" part you talk about, and allows the stretch in the dough during rising and formation of small holes. VERY essential in whole wheat bread making and especially so in bread machines. I add 1 heaping Tbs of wheat gluten in my recipes using whole wheat in my bread machine, and use only wheat with high protein content.
Hard Red Winter Wheat has a high gluten content as does a few other had wheat such as hard white spring wheat. If you are using flour for pasty cooking there is low gluten wheat available in the form of soft white wheat, usually spring wheat, and others.

In making beer, to keep the protein level down I would think that soft spring wheat or any of the low gluten wheats used in pastry would be the best choice to malt. If beer is similar to wine in respect to protein haze, an addition of 1-6 lbs / thousand gallons of bentonite during fermentation or first racking will floculate out the excess protein. It binds with the proteins and makes it so we don't end up with a protein haze in our wine. Again, it should work with beer as well.