40 cents a pound is a bit high.........The difference between on farm price and retail price in the city is obviously considerable........ one the order of 4x. I think your energy costs are way out of line. A typical home malting dryer uses a box with screens and a light bulb, and pale two row requires minimal kilning time. 70 to 80 cents a pound is preposterous. Pale two row is kilned at about 180F for 3-5 hours after being dried. Supposing 10 pounds of malt in a 180 deg oven... It doesn't even remotely add up to that kind of figure unless you are paying an absolutely outrageous amount for power. I frankly don't buy these numbers at all, and I suspect the people who are home malting would quickly challenge them also.
I'm paying 40 cents a pound for pale two row............ And you are telling me that it costs 70 to 80 cents a pound just to dry and kiln it........... Get real!!
H.W.
I didn't mean to insult you in any way, just relaying my experience. We happened to have on hand few sacks of barley for which we paid roughly $20 each. It was organic and intended for seeding pasture and we bought it from a feed store. If I lived in an area where barley is grown and had the connections I'm sure I could have found a better price. We didn't use them for the pasture so I did the malting experiment.
Electric rates are high where I live and each month our usage goes into the tier that costs 31 cents per kilowatt hour. Since the drying & kilning is in addition to all other use, I assumed that cost in my calculations.
My first batch of sprouted barley I tried using a food dehydrator. It was not effective and in fact was ruined by the process. Loss of both barley and the dehydrator. I'm not considering the costs associated with those losses.
We had a large plywood crate, about 2' wide, 4' deep and 7' tall (free). I built some removable screens (I didn't include the materials cost for these but it was something like $12 to $15) to provide enough area to spread the sprouted barley over to dry in a reasonable time. I had a 1500 watt space heater with a fan & thermostat. Inside the converted crate it maintained a constant 120 - 125 degrees while providing updraft to remove moisture laden air through the screened exhaust vent. On average, the heater remained on roughly 3/4 of the time, based on my observations, and the typical time required to dry was 36 hours. A couple of batches during damp weather needed 48 - 56 hours to dry completely.
I'm not sure how much propane my oven uses, so I won't consider any cost there.
Another thing I thought was interesting, every time I malted the result weighed almost exactly 85% of the original barley weight. My thought was that this a factor of the %moisture in the original barley and the weight loss from removing the root hairs after drying.
Doing the math and assuming 36 hours the cost is 69.75 cents a pound of barley or 82 cents a pound for the resultant malt. Realistically, I rarely started with 18 pounds, I usually started with an amount to yield what I'd need for a five gallon batch of beer, driving my per pound cost up further.
Can it be done cheaper? Certainly, otherwise commercial producers would not be able to sell at the current price. It was fun to do but, as mentioned before, I could not beat the cost or match the consistency of commercial malt. If you can, my hat is off to you. The best price I've found for base malt is about $38 a sack; you have a line on $20 malt (or free, depending on circumstances). Again, you win! :rockin:
