Does anybody have experience with using regular barley used as animal feed for making malt on their own? i have an endless supply of the stuff from a friend that uses it as animal feed.
I was wondering if i really need specialized malt or would regular barley make an OK beer. I’m mostly curious and I don’t want to waste time on a malt that would definitely result in a bad beer, I’m new at homebrewing and it would take up my only fermenting pot until it finishes.
any thoughts or suggestions? thanks!
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A lot of feed variety barley is actually a malt style 2 or 6 row barley that just didn’t make grade. Malt varieties are simply chosen for their traits to be more efficient at what all barley can do, which is to add sugars and enzymes to the wort. I grow “malt” varieties like Sirish and Synergy but I don’t expect to make malt, and frankly, I don’t even bother because the premium if it made germination and low protein levels is not high enough to delay getting it sold. But those varieties have good production and other harvesting traits I like.
I have malted our own barley and it works fine. Some things to look for are ergot; get all the black stuff out that you can, which will also get rid of stones and mildewed kernels. Ergot isn’t something you want to brew with, since it can produce a hallucinogen. Also, the less mildew in it, the less likely you will get molding when you malt. High protein that you might find in a feed grade just makes it more effort to clear the beer afterwards but a lot of styles don’t care, and if you do you can whirlfloc it or filter it.
Overall, I will say it’s hardly worth the trouble. At least where I am, I can get a sack of 2-row malt for about a buck a pound and that will do a few 5gal brews. It’s not really a large factor in the cost of a beer when it comes down to it. And malting takes up a lot of space and time.
Edit: and just to be clear, after I read the other comment: you do know you have to malt barley before you can brew with it, right? Because just dumping unmalted barley into a brew isn’t going to give you beer.
Malting it for base malt is probably not worth the effort indeed (kind of weird that there are a few small-scale enterprises around where I live who try to make small batches of malt - and it’s base malt. Of course it’s inferior to large scale, sadly, I had sad experience trying to use super-local. Why don’t they see the real market potential for weird stuff? Maybe I should take that space when I set the process?), but there are limitless potential specialty varieties you can try. Roast it differently? Skip toasting altogether and use it asap to see what happens? Reproduce some historical process? So much fun (probably).
Barley quality depends a lot on location. I’m in Alberta and we produce a majority of the malt barley for the world because of our climate. Its used for whiskeys and beers across the globe. So if you arent getting cold winters and intense hot summers, that might be the difference.
Yeah, I wanted to move to Alberta many years ago to join your university and have fun with bitumen. But I’m in Finland now, so winter is ok, and now summers are intense and hot everywhere. I don’t know why exactlt anybody would crop grow these grains south of here, where other things thrive. Leave hardy grasses for arctic steppes.
thanks for the info, i really appreciate it. i think i’ll read up on barley in general and get more information. i may be able to find out what specific strain he has growing. i didn’t even think about mold/ergot.
it’s not really about the money, it’s really about making a beer with what you have (of course i don’t have hops, but that could be arranged maybe next year i guess). and a beer made from his barley would be a great gift for him i guess.
yes, i know i’ll have to malt the barley first, i watched a video about that from Adam Ragusea on yt.
Well, let me know if you have any questions about barley and I’ll see if I can help. I have 30,000 bushels of it sitting in bins behind the house right now.
Do you use any automatic sorting to get rid of the bed kernels? I’m wondering if industrial high speed image detection sorting machines is something you can DIY
I used a compressed air blowgun, the venturi style, and some screens I use to clean grain for grading and measuring. It seemed with some practice I could get it to mostly blow the light, unfilled, and mildewed kernels out, and the ergot tended to gather at the bottom. But the black ones are easy enough to see and pick out. You can screen the rest out after malting because they won’t have a cotyledon and will fall through larger screens along with other ungerminated seeds.
Color sorters are hella expensive. I was looking at buying one for cleaning seed for planting. I think I was $30k for some janky one from China. I didn’t pull the trigger. https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Agricultural-Machinery-Color-Sorter-Machine-Plastic_1600352731858.html
You can get small ones for a couple thousand.
I’d love a tabletob machine learning sorter, manually sort a bunch and tell it which are bad and which are good and then let it sort the rest.
Sure, thanks! Thats a lot of barley :))
It would be interesting to experiment with how long one lets the germination to go on before roasting. And of course DIYing the malt opens up opportunities for smoking and such. So a lot of opportunity there, but certainly no savings to be made, since roasting is energy intensive and best done in large batches.
Yeah, i’m curious about that to, i’ll try to read up on malting before i start
If I were in your place, I would get a smaller test-fermenter and try small batches with part of the barley being the non-malted feed. Start small and then increase the proportion until something breaks.
right, no use making a large batch, i could ferment in something smaller than my 25 L fermenter (aka the bucket with a spout) also malting a few kg of barley would take some time. thanks!
But at the same time remember, that scaling (both ways) is the toughest task in chemical technology. Small masher has very different heat and matter exchange properties than large one, just take it into account. Expect efficiency to drop 2x or even more on first try.
I’ll keep thhat in mind, thanks!
I have similar situation (but right now I have ~20 kg of oats, there are other stuffs around too, I just happened to take oats), so I’m trying to build some decent malting equipment. Unfortunately, doing it outdoors in winter is sad enterprise, but I’m totally just giving it a try when I can! (Doing it indoors would be either stinky or loud, and I already have too many microbiological stuff going in same space) I do not believe I’ll lose much except for conversion rate and sugar content, but might discover some new flavor tones. When I’m done, I’ll be posting here and trying to share the product.
So I urge you to do the same!
There is no reason to expect that something will not ferment well just because it was not purebred for brewing. Even random yeasts mostly yield good results. Well, yeast is much more definitive in final profile and you CAN screw up by using some really stinky or low fermenting yeast. Grain, on the other hand, is just yeast food and grain flavour mostly (yes, there are other things to fine tune, but first order approximations is what we should care about in experimentation). Does it smell and taste good? Then go for it!
Thanks. i’ll post my results here, i’ll try to be as thourough as possible.
I might be wrong, but I assume agricultural barley, is not malted.
good point, but yes, i know, it is time consuming, but i find the whole process to be interesting. it’s more a novelty and a learning experience than it being very practical
