Malting Barley

Typically when you brew beer, you buy malted barley, but I wanted to dig deeper into the process so I gave malting a try. At a conceptual level, malting is ’tricking’ living barley seeds into sprouting, starting in motion the biochemical processes that unlock their carbohydrate reserves– then halting this process before the barley consumes those reserves.

Jon Palmer has a more technical description of what “malting” is-- at a simple level it’s “tricking” living barley seeds into sprouting, starting in motion the biochemical processes that unlock their carbohydrate reserves– then halting this process before the barley consumes those reserves.

Consider this a brief summary-with-photos of malting at home without specialized equipment. There’s very little practical reason to do this– you can buy a wide variety of high-quality malted grains for brewing, and it seems moderately difficult and labor-intensive to do well yourself– but it was still interesting to me, as part of working every step of brewing back to the basics:

But did it work? Was the barley’s dense endosperm carbohydrate matrix broken down into smaller starch granules, and did I manage to break down protective cellulose/protein wrappers? Did this process produce the alpha- and beta-amylase enzymes I’ll need during brewing?

The only way to know is to mash it– and after an hour soaking in 150F water it had produced a reasonable conversion of starch to sugar as shown by a non-zero Brix reading, and by taste test. It even made an acceptable one-pint-mason-jar-microbatch of saison (but a rather bland and thin one– it could use some specialty malts).

To be further continued in the malting experiments