This is the first malt made with this years crop of barley. The start of this video was made way back in September of 2015, I just didn’t get around to putting it all together. A surprising result of this experiment was the lack of off flavours from using un-kilned malt and the lack of bitterness I was expecting from including the rootlets in the mash. Perhaps this would be noticeable if I used 100% wind malt. Since this malt is un-kilned it retains it’s enzymes so it has a lot of diastatic power which may be handy to have around when using a large proportion of adjuncts or if you’re trying to make a light dry lager.
So far, so good. I’m pretty happy with how it’s coming up. I’m really surprised with how few weeds I’ve had this year. This is an advantage with growing grains or cover crops, they do an excellent job of choking out weeds. I also have been using the barley straw to keep the beds covered when they’re not being used and over the winter. This keeps the worms happy as well. This bed was only partially covered with re-may now the rest of the barley has caught up and it’s all evened out.
Someone asked me why I didn’t just plant the barley on one half of my plot one year and then the other side the next year. I had thought about doing this but decided to stick with my original plan of rotating the beds counter clockwise from year to year and staggering the barley in a checker board pattern. There’s no advantage to doing it this way other than ensuring that every second year a different vegetable is planted in each bed and I find it easier to remember where things where in the previous year.
Along with the barley I’m growing two beds of potatoes, by the way we’re still eating potatoes from last year – those two beds produced that much. I’m also going to plant cabbage, jalapeneo peppers, beans, pumpkins, beets, corn, and some summer squash from greece which looked like zuchinni but tasted like artichoke hearts, they were amazing. We also have two types of raspberries some blueberries and this year I threw in some rhubarb because my kids actually like the stuff (?!)
In the shot above you can see almost all of my plot. My neighbour has the greenhouse on the right and the large yet to be planted area. My plot goes as far as the blue and white rain barrel on the left side of the picture.
Here’s a real unique malt that I’m definitely going to use a lot more of in my brews. Brumalt, Melanoidin malt and Honey malt are from my understanding the same thing give or take a few degrees in colour. Honey malt is the proprietary name for a melanoidin malt produced by the Gambrinus malting company here in British Columbia, Canada.
Update: Although Gambrinus has referred to Honey malt as their version of a Brumalt and Brumalt and Melanoidin malt are often referred to as the same thing, (Wolfgang Kunze pg. 180 Technology Brewing and Malting, John Mallet pg. 119 Malt) it should be pointed out that Honey malt has it’s own unique flavour that is different than Melanoidin malt. As I am not entirely sure what the process is for making Honey malt it should not be regarded as being interchangeable with melanoidin malt.
I couldn’t find much information on the actual malting procedure, but I found enough to make a malt that is very sweet and extra malty in flavour. When it was kilning the aroma filled the house with something similar to dark toast with honey and perfectly roasted marshmallows. What info I did find is posted in the Information on malting section of this blog and one or two sentences in Malting and Brewing Science (authors listed in the info section).
A few questions still remain, however, since I have never actually seen this malt being produced and they have to do with the final phase of germination. If you watch the video you can see that by the end of the germination I had so much root growth that the malt formed a solid mass. Was this too much growth? Perhaps I should have covered it better to really deplete the oxygen. Was 36 hrs too long before raising the temperature? and how do they get it so hot anyway?
Like any malt, procedures vary slightly between the companies that produce it. My malting procedure went something like this:
5 steeps of 8 hrs with 8+ hrs rest in between
3 days germination, acropsire at 3/4 length
Transferred to a pot with a heavy lid, 36 hrs. at room temp possibly heating up a little on it’s own. (This is what I did and it worked but I would only do 18 hours next time to avoid excessive root growth)
Pot warmed in the oven (with a hotplate) to 45-50C for 18 hrs.
Malt taken out of the pot, put on a screen and kilned for 12 hrs.50-55C then 6 hrs.@ 60C
