Do I need to kiln my barley? (All Grain Recipe)

[andy-10]

After years of making beer with extract, I'm thinking of trying an All Grain recipe.

I don't have room for any specialist equipment so I'll be trying Brew in a Bag on my stove.

As I understand it (please correct me on this if I'm wrong) once I've sprouted my barley I need to kiln or bake it, to add flavour and to stop the sprouting process.

But in a normal oven, this will take a lot of time and work.

What if I just heavily kilned a third of the barley, then immediately mashed it with the other "green" two thirds? Would this be a problem?

Also, is it essential to put the grain through a crusher before adding it to the bag?

Thanks

 

[Lawrence22]

Have you grown it yourself?

 

[andy-10]

Have you grown it yourself?

No. I bought a 25kg bag from a grain merchant. (I grind it into flour to make bread too. It's very good grain.)

 

[Lawrence22]

I'll let someone else answer for sure but I believe there may be different types of Barley suited to bread. It will have to go through a malting process if you are going to try and brew from it. Which basically is germinating the barley and then quickly stopping the process as far as I am aware. Never done it myself as it is easy to buy already malted.

 

[Cheshire Cat]

Is your barley malted barley or just plain barley. To brew it must be malted. I wouldn’t try malting if I were you keep that for flour and buy malted barley.

 

[An Ankoù]

Buy a bag of pale malt. Much easier. It sounds as if you're germinating all the barley, but only drying a third of it. It may very well work, but I don't think it's going to taste very much like the best bitter you buy in the pub.

 

[andy-10]

Is your barley malted barley or just plain barley. To brew it must be malted. I wouldn’t try malting if I were you keep that for flour and buy malted barley.

It's unmalted. I wanted to try malting it myself, so that I could go through the full process of making beer from scratch. I've sprouted grains before, for eating , so I've some experience of how to do this.

 

[Brew_DD2]

All power to you if that's what you're wanting to do. You'll probably find very few on here who have done the same. Even the pro brewers don't malt their own barley. Would be a huge undertaking. The same reason we don't grow our own malt etc.

 

[simon12]

You need to be able to remove the sprouts and I don't think you could without drying it, also crushing/milling it is essential to extract the sugars the basics are here Malting Barley Grain at Home | Home Brewing Beer Blog by BeerSmith™ and you can find more links to people who have done it searching google. Good luck

 

[terrym]

Why make a simple job difficult?
Malted barley is produced by professional malsters who can turn out a reliable product, geared to a brewers needs. Not only that there is plenty of choice.
If malted barley was unobtainable that would be different.

 

[foxy]

No. I bought a 25kg bag from a grain merchant. (I grind it into flour to make bread too. It's very good grain.)

It isn't a good grain for brewing, you need a lower protein content and a lot of other considerations for malting barley. High protein is used for feed, human and animal.