You know that I am the Brewmaster and as such should Blog on beer making from time to time. The reason that I brew my own beer is that I am Cheap and for that reason I need my malt to also be Cheap. It has taken several years and several failures to perfect my malting technique. Now against my better judgement, I am going to share the fruits of my labor with all of you.
First, go to your local farm feed store and buy a bag of barley, but not just any bag of barley. Buy "Seed" barley. There are a lot of types, but the type does not matter all that much. Seed barley has been selected and cleaned so that it has a very high germination rate. That means, most of the seeds will sprout. With regular barley, there is no concern about the germination rate, but with malting there is.
Next you will need a bucket or some other container to wet the barley down in. I use a 10 gallon water canteen like you see at football games where the team dumps the Gatoraide onto the winning coach. These are cheap and have a good lid and a spigot on the bottom. They are also insulated and that will come in handy later. I like to use two of these containers. Fill the container about half full with barley and cover it with tap water at about 65-75 degrees and let stand for a couple of hours. Next, drain off any water and dump the barley into the other container and again cover the barley with water and imediatly drain off all the water from the bottom. This should wet the barley well enough to stimulate germination. Let stand at room temperature over night and next day dump the barley back into the other container. The purpose of this is to assure that a lot of air gets to the barley and that the barley at the bottom of the first container is not over soaked. Next day, do the same thing again and inspect the barley to see if little sprouts are starting to form. Keep this process up until the sprouts are about the same length as a barley seed. The sprout will fold back onto the seed so it will be easy to judge. If the barley starts to get hot during the process, pour on some cool water and dump it back into the other container. This whole process should not take more than 3 days.
Now comes the special part. Buy from one of the brewing supply houses a stainless steel convex shaped filter screen that will fit into the bottom of one of your 10 gallon containers. These screens are sold for use later in your Lautertun. The screen will come with a fitting in the center. Take this out and adapt a new fitting so that a garden hose can be connected to it. Now it gets interesting, but this is the big pay off. You will need a turbine type air compressor like those used for the new type of "High Volume Low Pressure" paint sprayers or HVLP. Attach he air hose to the center of the stainless steel convex screen and place it in the bottom of the empty container. Now you are ready to dump the sprouted barley into the container and turn on the compressor. Clean compressed air will now be forced down to the bottom of the container and up thru the wet sprouted barley. It may take upto 6 or 8 hours to completly dry down the wet barley. During this process, the new sprout on each barley seed will dry up and die. Now the first stage is complete.
Turn off and take out the air hose and filter and start dumping the barley back and forth between the two containers. This will cause the dried up sprouts to seperate and fall off. If you do this outside in the wind, the wind will blow all the dead sprouts away and you will end up with "Malt" that looks almost like the barley that you started with. If you have been buying malt from a supplier, this is what basic pure malt looks like.
From this point on you can use the malt like you would anyother pure untoasted malt. If you were to use this malt in beer making it would yield a very light colored and flavored beer. It would first have to be crushed and mashed, but that is the subject of another blog.
