Experiments in home malting

[phillc]

I decided to have a go at home malting.

My motivation is this all rye farmhouse recipe from Russia. Reading that article there's a couple of quite interesting aspects:

• The beer is 100% all rye grain
• The rye is malted at home
• The malt is not dried
• The malt is crushed with a meat grinder, which works well with the moist grains

After reading the article and a lot more on the Internet about home malting in general I decided to have a go.

I purchased a couple of bags of organic rye at the local farmer's market. It was roughly €1.35 per kilo.

First, 5kg of rye grain into a bucket of water. Washed once, drained, refilled and left submerged for 12 hours. The Russian farmhouse method only calls for 6 hours, but other Web commentators talk about multiple soaks, with air rests in between, but I could never really figure out if that was only relevant to barley or all grains. The problem with sprouting/germinating rye is that 95% of all online articles I could find dealt with 1kg or less, using mason jars. No one really seemed to talk about a decent amount, like 5kg.

After the overnight 12 hour soak, I removed the grain and put it in the largest box I had. This turned out to be not really large enough, and the rye was sitting in a good 15cm layer. I was worried about this and decided to make a specific malting box, but more on that later.

Anyway, it turns out that the smaller box and thick layer may not have been all bad. Given that the Russian farmhouse article just said the soaked rye grains were put in a bag for a few days, but not what kind of bag - plastic bag, cloth bag etc - I was guessing a bit by putting it in the box. On top of the grain went a wet cheesecloth.

After about 12 hours in the box, so 24 hours after the soak started, it was clear that small chits had started to appear on the grain.

I was turning the grain about every 6 hours, spraying some more water on directly to keep them moist and re-wetting the cheesecloth.

Part 2 coming......

 

[phillc]

After another 24 hours (48 since first soak) there were obvious rootlets on quite a few of the grains.

And I've been hard at work making a malting box, which I'm quite happy with and I think will do a better job than the smaller box. In this smaller box, the bottom of the grain bed was getting really compact and needed breaking apart. There was also a lot of heat in there.

And tonight, 72 hours since the beginning, the grains don't really appear to have changed all that much in the last 24 hours.

However, in my head, they seem to be more advanced than I expected them to be. As this is my first time malting, I am guessing a bit, but the plan was to brew Saturday afternoon, but depending how much longer those rootlets grow, it might happen later tomorrow afternoon. The grains are currently semi-soft and have a nice sweet grassy taste to them.

The plan is to roughly follow that Russian farmhouse method. I won't be drying the malts, just crushing them in a meat grinder and then going straight into a 15 hour reverse step mash (start at high heat and go down), although I'm going to add a 30 minute protein rest at the beginning as a lot of what I have read about 100% rye worts is that they're very viscous. I'll be adding 50g of Hellertau Hersbrucker hops at 60 minutes and another 50 grams of the same at 10 minutes remaining in a 60 minute boil. I don't like very hoppy beers and just want a little for bittering. I'm still not totally sure which yeast to use, but am thinking of trying a Hornindal kveik to stick with the farmhouse theme.

I'll keep the thread updated with progress....

 

[Deadhead]

Wow, this is so interesting .Watching with anticipation

 

[strange-steve]

This is brilliant, I think the first time I've seen any homebrewer malt their own grains
I look forward to hearing your results.

 

[MyQul]

Following too

 

[Loonytoone]

Good luck wit h the malting Phill
I have tried home malting a few times with barley for a zero food miles brew.
I also tried 5 Kgs at the same time.
The most difficulty I had was with drying the grains to arrest the germination and prepare for crushing.
I like the idea of crushing without drying, if it works I will try this method too.

For steeping the barley I settled on a step method after a few mis-starts:
soak - 8 hrs
drain - 16 hrs
soak - 8 hrs
drain - 16 hrs
soak - 8 hrs

I would then leave to germinate (turning whenever I passed by) until the acrospire is 3/4 length of the grain.
Drying for my latest attempt was one hour in a tumble-dryer followed by three days on a heated floor with a dehumidifier in a small room.

 

[Loonytoone]

I should add, the grains were in a hessian bag and it was an old tumble-dryer that was finished with clothes drying duties.

 

[phillc]

Time for a bit of an update here.

Once the grains were finished malting, at least, when I thought they looked about right, with zero past experience and only Internet guestimates to assist, I didn't dry them at all. The plan as mentioned was to crush them in a meat grinder.

I started with the smallest possible outlet holes on the meat grinder, which were about the same diameter as the malted rye grains. I ended up with a very fine rye grain puree, extremely sticky and a clogged meat grinder. That was within about 20 seconds of beginning.

Going up to the medium outlet holes wasn't a big improvement, but then using the largest possible outlet holes it was possible to "crush" the wet malted grain.

It took about 30 minutes to malt the full 5kg batch. Although in terms of volume, I estimate there was now more than twice as much as when starting with dried grain. The meat grinder also became very hot, with a bit of a nasty smell coming from the motor regions. I had to stop once and allow for a cool down. I guess domestic appliances perhaps aren't designed for this kind of work.

Next up was the brewing itself, which I'll leave for another post.

 

[phillc]

After reading about stuck sparges using 100% rye mashes, I decided to brew in bags. Two nylon washing bags, filled with milled malts, just about fitted in my 35 litre Klarstein Brauheld Pro. They felt a bit tight in there to be honest, but did all fit under the sparge plate.

The plan was to roughly follow the brew description from the website linked in the earlier post. Unfortunately, there weren't a load of details available, but now having read more about this process in Garshol's book, Historical Brewing Techniques, I may have gone about things a bit differently. Anyway, I proceeded with an initial protein rest for 30 minutes at 55 degrees Celsius, then a mash at 75 degrees Celsius for 450 minutes and a further 450 minutes at 65 degrees Celsius. In short, 15 hours of mashing overnight. There was 15 litres of initial strike water.

Next morning, I noticed a lot of floating white bits in the mash, which I assume are protein chains from some kind of hot break.

I sparged with 12 litres of water and removed the grain sacks. I think I made a big mistake here by not squeezing the grain bags nearly enough. In retrospect I even wondered about next time getting my apple press out to really squeeze them properly. Laziness and additional cleaning hold me back!

I then proceeded to boil at 100 degrees Celsius for 60 minutes.

I added 50 grams of Hallertau Hersbrucker hops at 60 minutes and a further 50 grams at 10 minutes remaining of the boil. These were actually quite old hops, from the 2017 season, although stored in a nice sealed foil bag. I expect the alpha acids had dropped somewhat from the stated 3.2%, but that's also fine with me as I generally prefer low alpha acid hops.

After the boil, transfer and cooling I ended up with about 18 litres of wort in the fermenter. This was a bit disappointing really and perhaps I should have used another 3 litres of sparge water. Or squeezed the bags of grain much better because my efficiency was totally crap and OG was measured at a temperature adjusted 1025. Really deflating after all the work, and the low gravity was also why I didn't just top up with wort volume with additional water.

Anyway, I proceeded with the fermentation to at least get a feeling for the taste of this concoction. I pitched Hornindal kveik obtained from the Yeaster Bunny (an eBay seller, but located in Hungary). This was supposed to be a fast fermenting yeast, finished in 48 hours. In reality, I pitched last Sunday and bubbles really only stopped exiting the blow off tube yesterday (Friday). I will either bottle later today or tomorrow.

The colour of the wort has significantly lightened too. Quite dark in the picture above, which was just about when I pitched the yeast. It's more like the colour of the header on this forum now.

I have also tried top cropping this yeast from the fermentation after 40 hours, but that's probably for another thread.

Initial tastes of the wort before fermentation were quite spicy, but also a potential sour note. A taste after 40 hours when cropping the yeast also retained the spiciness, but the sourness had receeded. It's going to be a very interesting brew.

 

[strange-steve]

Shame about the low OG, any thoughts on why?

 

[phillc]

Shame about the low OG, any thoughts on why?

Could be a number of reasons, including poor malting, but what I really think happened was an awful job sparging. The grains in the bags were packed into the mash tun so tightly, I don't think the sparge water really rinsed out much of the sugars. I also could have used that extra 3 litres of water. And lastly, I just left too much water in the grains after sparging and didn't squeeze them well enough. During clean up, I noticed how sticky the bottom of the grain bags were, after they'd been sitting on the grass for a few hours while I boiled, cooled and transferred the wort.

If I was to do this again, which I will if it tastes anything like decent (and I initially bought 10kg of rye grains, so have another 5kg ready to go), I will do away with the top sparge plate, loosen the grains in the bags, while wearing rubber gloves because it's still hot in there, sparge with more water and then also really squeeze the last of the water from the grain sacks.

 

[Cwrw666]

Very interesting thread. If I were you, after sprouting the next lot of grains, I would dry them as it's possible that this step is actually necessary to get the best out of the grains.

 

[phillc]

Very interesting thread. If I were you, after sprouting the next lot of grains, I would dry them as it's possible that this step is actually necessary to get the best out of the grains.

I did think about that too, and maybe a bit more sugar could be extracted. However, from the article I was roughly following:

"So," I asked, "how do you dry the malts?"
Dmitriy: "I don't dry them."
Me: "You don't dry them?"
Dmitriy: "No, I don't dry them." An impish smile flashed over his face.

Silence, only broken by the whirring of Dmitriy's meat grinder milling the malts, while I pondered this.

How could he not dry the malts? I'd never heard of such a thing. Stunned, I started listing in my mind the reasons why you need to dry the malts. One reason is so it won't grow mouldy in storage, but Dmitriy malts for each brew, so that's not a problem for him. Another reason is so you can grind it. But Dmitriy's using a modern meat grinder, so he can easily grind wet malts. And this is rye malts, so it will have colour and flavour even without being dried hot.

So, however weird it sounded, it actually made sense for Dmitriy not to dry the malts. He doesn't need to.

As I was using the malts immediately and using the meat grinder method, I didn't especially think the malts needed drying. Perhaps another time I can try a similar experiment and dry the malts.

The big thing for me is going to be whether I like the beer. Even if this first batch is low ABV, if the taste is good, I'll have another go. If I don't like the taste of 100% rye, then I'll try something else, perhaps only 50% rye or less.

 

[phillc]

I bottled this 100% rye beer yesterday evening and it is an interesting thing. I think it's going to be super low on alcohol as it only attenuated to 1010, but I'm OK with that. The taste straight from the fermenter is slightly sour, slightly bitter, a little peppery, some fruitiness somehow (wife described it as apples). I think chilled and with carbonation it might not be a bad drink.

 

[Budgie]

Fascinating read. Looking forward to hearing how this turns out.

 

[Gerryjo]

Excellent stuff and hope your next batch goes better but that's experimental brews and the good thing is you learn from it. Keep it up.

 

[phillc]

Five or so months later it's perhaps worth a quick update. I still have a few of bottles of these left. I have one every now and then to see if anything's changed. It has a little bit. Over the five months this has been in the bottles, the sourness has mellowed to the point where I quite like it now - either that or I've acquired the taste.

I shared a few bottles with colleagues over the summer. Some quite liked the taste. Other hated it.

I drank a partial rye beer (20% rye I think it was) from a local craft brewery a month or so back, and there was definitely a hint of the same flavour. This leads me to wonder whether it's just inherent with the type of grain.

If I was to try this again with 100% rye, I'd really try a different mash technique, but I'd also go large on the aroma hops to try and temper that sourness.

Overall, I've brewed a lot worse but it's not a favourite I'm rushing to brew again.