Home Distiller

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)

They say a picture's worth a thousand words, so hopefully a few of these will fill in some gaps.


I start out with 6-row barley grown by my friend Saul, a local farmer who is also my partner in malting and brewing. Obviously, 2-row barley will work nicely, too. It's just that 6-row is what seems to grow the best where I am. In this photo, I am removing chaff, a few dead bugs, and anything else out of the ordinary.



Here I am steeping the barley. It will swell about 30 percent in volume during this step, so have some extra space in your bucket, starting off.



This is my germination setup. It is basically a frame of 1x4 lumber with cotton canvas stretched tight on one side and stapled in place. I put the germinating grain on top of that piece of cotton canvas and lay a second piece of cotton canvas over the top of the grain to keep the moisture in. It's something like a damp, canvas "cot and sleeping bag", if you want to think of it that way.



This is a closer look at the germinating barley. You can't really tell by the photo, but this barley is ready to dry.



This is a closeup of a single barley corn with the acrospire approximately 75 percent of the length of the grain. On some barley corns, you will have a little shorter acrospire, and on others, a little longer. But 75 percent of the length of the grain is a good goal for the average.



This is my drying setup. I started with a 1x4 lumber frame, to which I attached some spindly wooden legs. Then I stapled one piece of food-safe ‏polypropylene mesh to the bottom side of the box and another piece of the same mesh to the top side of the box, except that it is only stapled on two adjacent sides.



Here is another view of my drying setup, this time with a couple pieces of angle-iron holding down the two unstapled sides of the mesh and three bricks holding those two angle-irons in place. I am relying predominantly on sun-drying, but I have found it helpful to use a fan at times. Usually I will use it to kick-start the drying process for the first few hours, at least long enough to dry out the roots. Then, if it is sunny outside, I will cut off the fan and rely purely on sunshine. Of course, sometimes you have an unexpected cloudy/rainy spell, and that is where the fan really saves the day. Fan-drying will halt germination in a matter of hours and then dry the grain down to where it is stable and storable in a day or two.



This is what the barley looks like after it has dried out again. You can still see a few dried roots attached, but I can remove those later, after the grain is cured/kilned. It is important to dry the grain down to the point where it is crispy when bitten before moving on to the curing/kilning process. Otherwise, all of the enzymes will be destroyed when the temperature of the grain goes from around 50 °C up to 100 °C. Also, grain that is too damp will likely mold in a stagnant oven.



This is how I am curing/kilning. I am making a batch of base malt, so the alarm on my thermometer is set to go off when the temperature inside the oven reaches 105 °C.



Here is a look at the grain inside my oven, along with the probe for my thermometer. You really want to use a good thermometer because oven thermostats are notoriously unreliable.



One way or another, you want to stir the grain around a bit, about every 15-20 minutes, to get a consistent curing/kilning.



These are some of my finished malts. As you can see, my gold and amber malts do not look much different from my base malt. But looks can be deceiving. My base malt is around 3 °L, color-wise, and it tastes about like fresh-baked bread. My gold malt is around 15 °L, color-wise, and it tastes more like Grape-Nuts cereal. And my amber malt is around 50 °L, color-wise, and it tastes a lot like Wheat Chex cereal. The brown malt that you see here is about 150 °L, color-wise, and it tastes somewhere between over-toasted bread and roasted coffee. And finally, you can not tell from the picture, but the 40L caramel malt that you see here has a much more glazed appearance when you see it in good light ... and a wonderful caramel taste! Yum!

Nice!, thanks for sharing. I've been malting corn for a while, haven't tried anything else. Too easy to go to the hbs i guess.

Nice writeup. Thanks.

It is important to dry the grain down to the point where it is crispy when bitten before moving on to the curing/kilning process. Otherwise, all of the enzymes will be destroyed when the temperature of the grain goes from around 50 °C up to 100 °C.

Can you really heat it to 100C without denaturing the enzymes? Cuz everything I have read says that they won't survive.

This is really, really cool. Thanks for posting it. I kind of knew the steps somewhat but it is great with the pictures. I'd love to see this progress if you scale it up to larger quantities. Well done!

Thanks guys.

skow69 wrote:Can you really heat it to 100C without denaturing the enzymes? Cuz everything I have read says that they won't survive.

The trouble is that a lot of guys are following the same bad information on the internet that leads them to start curing/kilning while the moisture level of the grain is too high. That is what is destroying their enzymes.

If you dry the grain down to where it's crispy, the enzymes will survive well into the curing/kilning process. The diastatic power will actually run something like this:

Kilning | Diastatic
Temp | Power
-----------------------------
Up to 80 °C | 160 °Linter
80-100 °C | 150 °Linter
100-110 °C | 100 °Linter
110-120 °C | 80 °Linter
120-130 °C | 50 °Linter
130-140 °C | 20 °Linter
Above 140 °C | 0 °Linter

Something like that, anyway.

Wow. That's great to know. Thanks.

Apologies for the necro, but I wanted to say thanks for this. I read it when you first posted it, but wasn't at a point where I could understand why you were doing it. I've read a few instances of people malting feed barley, and I think I'm going to give it a shot.

My LHBs only sells 1lb bags of 6-row. I'm doing a group buy next week, but the travel and arrangements are a PITA. It'd be nice to spend a few weeks in the summer preparing enough to get me through the Winter.

+1
I also thank you for the post.
My success with feed barley was not very good. Only got 10% germination. Tried 3 times.
My malted wheat on the other hand reaches 90% at least. Fabulous method.

Cheers.

Sounds good, raketemensch. Let me know how it works out for you.

And thanks for posting, Fart Vader. I'm glad to hear you're having success with the wheat anyway.

Yeah, the feed barley is what it is. Sometimes it just has a small grain and a lot of husk, but it sprouts very well.

And other times, it's been degraded by mold/fungus/whatever, and it has a very low germination rate.

I'm guess that was the trouble with the feed grade barley that you had.

Thanks for the post Bob
It looks like we are doing it almost the same

Hi guys, I finally got around to mashing my malted wheat (using a variation of Buccaneer's method).
Two 55lb batches using 27 gallons of water (2:1). I ended up with an OG of 1.05 on both.
Respectable numbers ?

Sounds good to me, Fart Vader.

I plugged it into this calculator.

If I use 27 gallons as both your "Wort Collected (pre-boil)" and your "Batch Size (after boil)" -- since we're not sparging or boiling the wort -- and 55 pounds of "American - wheat" in the grain section, you could reach a theoretical 1.058 O.G. with 75% efficiency.

According to the calculator, you are achieving around 65% efficiency, if I haven't done this wrong. Now there will always be guys who complain that you could have gotten better conversion or whatever, but by my reckoning, that is SUPER for home-malted grain, especially for just starting out with home-malting.

And if anybody does complain about your efficiency, you just ask them how they tend to come out dollars-invested-per-unit-of-alcohol-returned because you will be able to spank the purchased-malt crowd from here to Timbuktu when they answer you that.

Thanks so much for sharing, and keep up the good work.

Hey thanks BB, considering I've been getting the same numbers with Booner's I thought it was a pretty good result without additional enzymes. Nice to have somebody confirm that.

P.S.
Thanks again for posting your method.

Hi again BB, I decided to try malting some feed barley one more time. I figured I must be doing something wrong.
My work schedule makes it so that I can only tend to malting chores every 12 hours.
This week I've been off work and decided to try the barley again.

The source of my previous failures has been the 12 hour steep. 12 hours works great for my wheat, but the barley drowns.
I followed your instructions precisely and my barley is coming along perfectly.
A six hour steep is the magic number for barley.

I just wanted to share my success story with you.

Cheers,
FV

Thanks so much for the update, Fart Vader. I'm so happy it's working for you.

Just in time for me you kicked up: I started yesterday with sprouting barley.

One question: I learned that the roots must be removed because they make the beer taste bitter. Does this taste come into your whisky too? And if not, can I just brew with the fresh sprouted grain? Saves two steps at least, drying and soaking, and time.
I left the roots in a wheat and when I blendered the sprouted grain, the roots bundled together and some of these nots I could take out. The resulting distillate is not bitter.

Hmm. Interesting question actually.
I too have used wheat with shoots and all and didn't notice a difference.

I guess it's worth a try mashing without drying. I'm no expert but I believe conversion has occurred by that point.
Heck, try it and report back. Or do a mini batch to test, you know 4 lbs wet grain with 2 gallons of water.
My current batch is pretty much dry right now and taking on some hickory smoke, too late for me to try.

I just have started a batch sprouting and have a tight scedule with vacation and that. I run it without drying of the roots and see/taste what happens.
When it turns out bitter, I make the next round with drying and without roots. When not, I will go on as planned.

I could be wrong, but my understanding is that the drying kills the plant without denaturing the enzymes.

Not sure what the outcome will be if you miss the drying step but I would imaging that the seed will continue to grow for a period thereby reducing the available sugars. How much this will influence the ferment and the taste, I don't know.

So if you are going to try it, it would be interesting to see the effects.

That is why I grind the grains. Not with a mill of course, because it is too wet, but with a blender used for soup or smoothie making. I try to make the equivalent of a course grinding.
Workd for the wheat, was a problem with corn, for that stays very hard.

You can skip the drying phase. It's called green malt. Has a whole different taste.

Wet grains don't like regular grain Mills. So you will need another solution.

Keep us updated how you like the green malt

Kareltje wrote:I just have started a batch sprouting and have a tight scedule with vacation and that. I run it without drying of the roots and see/taste what happens.
When it turns out bitter, I make the next round with drying and without roots. When not, I will go on as planned.

Hi, Kareltje, sorry I missed your reply until just now, but I've heard the same as yakattack, that green malt will taste different.

I have never tried making anything out of green malt before, but I know that it tastes like a cross between watermelon and grass.

So I'd say you would end up with a watermelony, grassy spirit, unless you run it through a column still and make a neutral.

If you're going for vodka, I'd imagine working with green malt would be a real time saver.

But if you're looking to retain the flavor of the grain, you'd probably want to follow through with drying and curing/kilning.

I do hope kareltje lets us know how it turns out - My guess is that malt whisky first started because barley got wet in that Scotch climate and started to sprout in the autumn. I don't think the first farmers would have thought about drying the sprouted corn (in th uk barley, wheat oats etc are ALL classified as "corn" although we do understand the US usage ) before brewing their "beer" and then starting to still it to keep ?

posting on behalf of Cu29er, a new member, because we have not had an intro from him in welcome, but it seems like information that is germane to the thread.

I have been looking at green malting ... working on getting a good yield. Compost pile has been benefiting the most so far.

this study might help some.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow ... 1930.x/pdf

HDNB wrote:posting on behalf of Cu29er, a new member, because we have not had an intro from him in welcome, but it seems like information that is germane to the thread.

I have been looking at green malting ... working on getting a good yield. Compost pile has been benefiting the most so far.

this study might help some.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow ... 1930.x/pdf

Yeah, I tried clicking the link, but the link appears to have gotten messed up in the quoting process?

Here is the link again.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 1930.x/pdf

Cu29er wrote:Here is the link again.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 1930.x/pdf

Interesting.

Yeah, they are saying that you can boil away the "green" flavor and aroma of green malt, much like you would boil away the dimethyl sulfide from wort when brewing beer (the kind you drink).

Until now I have problems with the sprouting of the barley. It is a seeding barley to grow malting barley, so supposed to sprout easily and evenly. But it does not!
Until now I have only a small part of the grains sprouted, so I am changing the regime, but undocumented.

I was focused on the myth of bitter roots, so I neglected other variables.
But we go on!

I now have an idea of my mistake.
I wrapped up the grain in sheets, which I kept wet. Opening the wrap twice a day, stirring the grain, wrapping it up again and watering it. It sprouted very irregular, with a few sprouting with some roots and long leafs, while others did nothing. And it got slimey and developed en strong smell.
Until one day I noticed the upper sheet looked very closed and it reminded me of water boarding. So I opened it up.

The next batch I laid on a wet towel in a open frying pan, covering it with a large lid. This batch sprouted much more evenly and with much more roots. Smelling less strong and growing more in volume.

Unfortunately I am mixing it in one ferment, so it is impossble to find out which procedure will give the best result.
I will use the second method.
(For wheat the first method seemed to work very good. But maybe the piece of cloth is changed during the use.)