You can all laugh in a moment! I then discovered it is best to kiln malt, especially anything other than lager malt. So my 'polytunnel malting' which was made into a 'bitter' with my homemade crystal turned into a rather peculiar, (but dare I say it - SPLENDID!) sort of, well, lager? It is a bizarre pint, its the first one out of the keg so a bit cloudy but this is genuinely a pint made from home malted barley, home grown hops, washed yeast and nothing else. Ok I lie, I had to use 2oz of sugar to prime the keg. The point here is - it can be done.
My other malts I am drying in the polytunnel then kilning in the oven. It has been an interesting and truly satisfying experiment to know that I can actually produce a very fine lager malt by air drying at 40 - 50c. As for the taste, (quick glug). Its very crisp, malty (maybe my crystal which turned out more like a Munich malt), not yeasty despite me using Notingham as opposed to a lager yeast in this one. Bittering was Goldings for main boil and Fuggles at flameout, its a 1040 beer and too hoppy and bitter for a lager (about 38IBU) as there are no 'noble' hops in this. Yet its actually very nice and what I might call 'Kentish Lager'? There isn't enough fizz for a lager, but I'm ok with that, I can work on that easy enough.
That's the end of my posting about home malting,(thank God you all say!). I wanted to give it a go and share it with you guys because you have all given me a lot over the years, its nice to give something back and this post may be of use to someone. If you are skint, can't afford postage abroad (me) or just plain mad (I guess thats all of us right?) then have a think about getting a sack of barley in and malting a bit. Barley is CHEAP!
You may well be pleasantly suprised and a tad proud of yourself as you take your brewing up a notch. As for me, I'm off for a refill, happy days! Sub
