malting at home

I have read some posts and watched youtube videos of malting your own grain. I am delving into this area, along with making my first attempt at capturing and isolating wild yeast cultures. First I will say that the majority of the home malt guys are telling you to go to the feed store and pick up a sack of feed barley. WRONG! Today I went out into Amish country searching for two row barley seed that was non GMO and untreated with any chemicals. I was real happy with myself until I got home and researched the barley strain. It turns out that it is suitable for forage and not malting. If you google "accepted barley's for malting you will find a list. I now have a fifty pound sack of forage feed. I'm not plugging and particular site, but "Conlon" two row is an acceptable barley for malting. Johnny's seed has it in bulk in regular and organic. So no matter where you buy the seed don't be a dufus and buy fifty pounds of inferior grain of the forage variety.
        Secondly regarding yeast propagation there's a guy on youtube under the name of Sui Generis. I highly recommend you watch those three videos. He also has a video of how to make Belgian style candy sugar. This dude works in a lab and probably has a microbiology degree. That's my two cents worth, and maybe it will help the next guy out there.

woodeye,

Do not despair.  Any live grain/seed is maltable.  Malting is simply starting germination of the seed so that enzymes from the aluerone breakdown the protein matrix and make the starches enclosed within that matrix available to the embryo as food.  If you stop that germination process by kilning when the acrospire reaches between 3/4 to the full length of the seed most of those starches are then available to your mash.

The moniker "not a malting barley" is used by the American Malting Barley Association (AMBA) which is run by the mega breweries whose main products are light American lagers.  Their "malting barleys" are just a handful (10 or so) of 21,000 varieties of barley in existence today.  All of those AMBA "malting barleys" are very close in genome, flavor, brewing performance and malting cycle time.  The mega breweries cannot tolerate different flavors or brewing performance and the mega malthouses cannot tolerate a grain that takes a longer or shorter time to malt.  Hence they agree to discount thousands of barley varieties other than their "malting barleys".

Long story made shorter... Try malting what you have.  Taste it against commercial malts and check it out in your brews.  There's a huge untapped world of flavors out there.

There are many hundreds (if not thousands) if different cultivars of barley grown commercially.  Some are more suited to malting than others.  Most strains of barley grown for feed have a higher protein content.  Those bred and grown for malting generally have lower protein content and higher concentrations of the critical enzymes needed for starch conversion.

That said, they can all be malted and you may be pleasantly surprised by the flavors you develop.

Thanks for the input. But the next sack of barley I buy will be Conlon two row which I have a source to buy that. I bought a pretty nice dehydrator. that's programmable for up to 150 degrees. This will work great for drying base malt. I saw a nice idea of using a Ronco rotisserie with a metal coffee can attached to the spindles to make darker roast malt. If I can find one at goodwill then I may give that a whirl.  As for crystal malt, from what I understand, is that once I have some finished malt, I should soak that malt and allow it to convert starch to sugar, and then to kiln that. I've thought about using the dehydrator for this also. I thought I would put the soaked malt in a covered ceramic container at 120  degrees for a protein rest and then finish it at max 150 until scarification takes place, and they dry it at the same temp. Obviously you don't want it swimming in liquid or you would have wort. Also one of my favorite malts is special B. I use it very sparingly, but it gives great character to darker beers. I'm thinking that with the rotisserie roaster set up I can kiln some fairly dark caramel malt. My favorite ale style which is my own skirts the parameters of two styles. i guess you could call it an ESB, or an Imperial brown ale, if there is such a thing. I don't particularly like the flavor that chocolate malt give and prefer special B for that purpose. I also prefer Perle or Northern Brewer for a bittering hop, and I use Mt. Hood as a finishing hop. This in not a classic ale selection, but I prefer more of a malty finish.

A book you may want to look up:  'Roasted: A Homebrewer's Guide to Home Roasting Grain' by Jason Johnson.  I know at one point it was a free read from Amazon on their kindle readers/apps.