Money has been tight with getting retrenched and opening a new restaurant and all, but lo and behold when a door closes a window opens. In my case this window takes the form of potato peels!
At the restaurant we peel, cut and deep fry about 100-200kg of potatoes a week and all the potato peels(with the rest of the kitchen waste) gets collected by a nearby pig farmer. I looked at these taters and thought "spoiled pigs, there's some good starch there". Waste not want not and the best price is "free". So I start reading, HD of course. Lots info on AGs, brewing, some info on potatoes, some on malting... not much on peels though.
So malt is unavailable (lock down, oh well nevermind), but I live in the middle of grain farm country. North of the karoo(which is most sheep-farm area IIRC) along the Orange river, it's all grain farms. Can't find barley, buy mielies (maize/corn) at ZAR4,5/kg (vs sugar at ZAR14/kg), find barley, swear at myself for being hasty, proceed to malt the corn.
So about 9 days ago I bought 50kgs, 1 bag of mielies. Figured I can get 10+kgs of peels a day, I've got 3 250l fermenters that I been itching to get wet, plenty of buckets and assorted small fermenters. Like an idiot, I decide to start my experiment with the whole bag
dump bag in bath, fill bath with water, climb on phone and get back to reading HD.Realized my mistake too late, bag is bursting at the seams. Quickly move about 1/4 of bag into buckets and back to the soak.
9-10hrs soak(I overslept), next morning drain
air rest for 5-6hrs
Soak 8-9 hrs off to work
Air rest overnight
Starting to chit.
Next morning next mistake.
So I don't have anywhere to put all these grains, a hell of a lot more than I thought it would be. Take some bags that the stuff comes in. We call them "streep sakke" but it's really some type of woven plastic bag, that grains usually come in. Lay them flat on the bedroom floor (very supportive SO) spread the grains 10-20cm deep (not enough space), wet with spray from a 2l PET bottle with holes punched in the lid. Turn, wet, spread 3 times a day for 5 days. On day 3 I got hold of an old bed sheet (from the very supportive SO) and covered them all to keep more moisture in.
It's not looking good. Uneven sprouting, 3-4 tiny patches of white mold on the broken/dead grains. The floor underneath is a moist sticky something, top grains feel dry. I'd guess 75% germination, between 7cm and 2cm acrospires. The smell is... interesting, sort of between wet, corn, earthy, green, brown, type of smell. Worried it's going moldy or just stalled or maybe even dead. I've started drying a smallish batch in the sun to test if there's any enzyme activity at all.
I'll be getting iodine in 2 days time. I'll make a mash with 500g of the malt and do a starch test. Then repeat small batches (500g - 1kg) with varying ratios of (pre-gelatenized) peels and malt to see if this is going to work. Worst case scenario I've got 50kg of semi modified grains for a batch of neutrals.
Tl;dr:
Free potato peels, need malt, was stupid, tried malting 50kgs of maize, worried about the grains. Will attempt a salvage op.
yeah, probably the best advice to be sure, but everyone just does the corn 
Where's the fun in that? 
) cooked until the pot was letting off steam for about 10 minutes and mashed it all up with a hand masher, it filled about 7l of the 10l bucket. Did another batch and filled 2 buckets full. Figured once I get my malt I can just bring this up to malting temp add the malt and see if it thins out.
SS has nailed it.
. I hate mechanic work. As I'm struggling with the sump its starts raining, it still hasn't stopped raining and the car still isn't fixed 
my malt is sopping wet and in the meantime it looks like a 36hr mash with potatoes isn't a good idea, it started foaming and climbed out the bucket. Blanket is full of mushed potato bits, and the bucket smells like old man farts.
not that I have any, being so behind with my stilling and the job eating up all my time.
so the easy large batch corn mashing method is out.
