Local wheat/barley

[Chupidacabra]

I have a friend who is a local farmer. He is offering some free wheat and barley. What would have to be done to use this in brewing? Also he asked if I wanted high protein or low protein wheat. Anyone have experience with this?


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[sandyeggoxj]

You would need to malt it. Totally doable to do at home.

 

[Chupidacabra]

What's a good source on the subject?


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[NTexBrewer]

I get wheat from a friend. I have used it with great results. It does not need to be malted. You just need to make sure you use enough malted grains with enough enzymes to convert the unmalted grains.

I'm on my phone so I can't find some of the links that talk about how to figure if you have enough malted grains to convert unmalted grains.

Will try to post that when I'm on the computer.

Belgian wits usually use unmalted wheat.

I have tried to malt the wheat and did not have good results.

The wheat I get is pretty clean but I still need to sift through it to pick out weed seeds, small rocks and the occasional grass hopper parts.

After about 6 months I had to throw out the wheat as it got too buggy.

The higher protein wheat will just make the beer more cloudy, but the low protein wheat wi also produce a cloudy beer.




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[NTexBrewer]

Article on Diastatic Power of Malt. This is good source if you are using unmalted grains.

http://beersmith.com/blog/2010/01/04/diastatic-power-and-mashing-your-beer/

Here is a good article about malting grains.

http://byo.com/malt/item/1092-make-your-own-malt

You can also find all kinds of videos on Youtube about malting barley and see how people do it. From my experience with wheat, it is difficult to malt and maintain good enzyme activity. Maybe as the BYO article suggests with barley you could look into making specialty malts and still use store bought malt for your base grains.