first home malt brewing project

[400d]

hi there to all of you guys!

next week I intend to malt barley at home. I have been reading alot about it and I know it is going to be hard, but anyway I want to do it.

I have some organic barley available which I'm buying today.

this is what I'm going to do - I will malt it, and then I will cut the recipe to half.

to this half I will add 30% more grains. so it will be half the yeast, half the hops, half the water, and half + 30% grains.

I will add some coriander seeds to my secondary.

I use safeale US-04 yeast, magnum hops for bitterness and super styrian for flavour.

if you have any advice, please feel free to post

[delboy]

My advice is to trial your germination regimens with smallish amount of grain, you need to get v. high rates of germination and your unlikely to acheive this on your very first attempt.

Good luck with it.

[lukesharpe]

Here's a good video on home malting. Enjoy

Malting

[400d]

My advice is to trial your germination regimens with smallish amount of grain, you need to get v. high rates of germination and your unlikely to acheive this on your very first attempt.

Good luck with it.

but do you think that increasing the amounts of grain in a mash for 30% would be enough to get decent efficiency?

[delboy]

My advice is to trial your germination regimens with smallish amount of grain, you need to get v. high rates of germination and your unlikely to acheive this on your very first attempt.

Good luck with it.

but do you think that increasing the amounts of grain in a mash for 30% would be enough to get decent efficiency?

That will depend largely on your germination rate, if you have to much unmalted(ungerminated malt) then you'll have all sorts of problems with milling/hazes etc.
Yes you could bump up the amount of grain to compensate but i still think you'll need to acheive a reasonably high germination rate. I would aim to be looking at 75 % germination rate as a minimum and hopefully much higher.
Be completely honest with yourself, don't just estimate germination by looking at it (its very, very deceiving) take a handful and count germinated vs ungerminated to work out the percentage.

Good luck with it, if you do have any sucess be sure and post it, myself and a few others on here would be interested.

[delboy]

Edit makes more sense if this reply goes below as i doesn't look like i was able to travel back in time and reply to your post before you posted it (i cheated , i saw you had posted it on the wrong thread, so i checkily replied before you'd even posted it here

[400d]

my idea of how to increase the germinating rate is to spread all the grains on a very large cotton sheet. this layer of grains would be only one grain thick, which means I wouldn't have any grains on top of another. after that I would spray with water every once in a while....

I think this would help alot. what do you think?

[400d]

I think you'll still need to do a steep to get the water concentration up high enough to cause germination in the first but the sheet idea is probably a good one, although it may allow them to dry out to quickly.

of course I will steep untill I get chits. after that comes the sheet thing

under the cotton sheet I will put a nylon sheet which will keep the moisture around....

[delboy]

I think you'll still need to do a steep to get the water concentration up high enough to cause germination in the first but the sheet idea is probably a good one, although it may allow them to dry out to quickly.

[delboy]

I think we've torn the fabric of the space time continium

1.121 gigawatts marty

[delboy]

My own gut feeling is that temperature as well as water content is going to be critical to germination success, if i was to revisit homemalting i'd probably try it in one of my temp controlled fridges.