How to Malt Barley (or Wheat) for Beer (or Whisky/Whiskey)

[Buccaneer Bob]

I mentioned awhile back that I have been working with a professional distiller who wants to start producing my rum professionally.

That project is slowly moving forward, and we are hoping to be exporting rum in six months to a year, if all goes according to plan.

But my partner also wants me to help him develop a line of artisan beer for the domestic market, and that is where we are, currently, in this whole big process.

Fortunately for me, I happen to have some beer brewing experience from my younger days, so that was good.

But the cost of importing tons of malt from around the world and having it shipped here was really going to be a deal-breaker for the artisan beer project.

There was just no way that we were going to be able to sell beer for what it was going to cost us to produce it.

So here we are: we have this thriving domestic beer market -- even if it is all just crappy BMC-style beer -- and this country grows 650,000 metric tons of barley every year to supply it.

But every single grain of that barley goes straight from the field to a professional brewery's inhouse malting operation, and folks dreaming about home-brewing or craft-brewing never get a chance at it.

Well, as luck would have it, I met a local farmer who just so happens to grow barley for one of the major breweries, and he was nice enough to hold back a few tons of his barley from the summer harvest, just for me to play around with it.

So ... that just left me with learning how to turn barley into malt.

Of course, that was no easy feat, especially given all of the bad information related to barley malting currently permeating the internet.

But I have dug through literally hundreds of sources of information related to malting, from out-of-print books that are hundreds of years old to sales fliers from modern-day maltsters.

And I have experimented, and I have brewed beer with my malting experiments, and I have slowly-but-surely started producing malts that are every bit as good as anything I could purchase from a professional maltster.

And I have documented my process to share it, just in case anybody out there is interested. You can download my process in PDF format down below.

This has been a work-in-progress for awhile, now, and I am sure that it needs a bit more work. So let me know if you see any typos, find anything confusing, etc., so I can fix things.

How to Malt Barley (or Wheat) for Beer (or Whisky/Whiskey)