Gentlemen....
I know I am new here, but I do have some experience with malting and drying barley for making whiskey and beer.
I will take this opportunity to share with you my experience with making the equipment to malt grains, dry grains and mill the malted and dried grain. I have made a rotary malt floor, repurposed a clothed dryer as a malt kiln, and built from scratch a roller mill for processing grains for mashing.
I have documented these builds on another forum, and with the blessing of the admin of this forum, i will link to those build threads.....
First off, a bit of information on the theory of malting grains:
I realize some here may be using feedstore barley because it's cheap and available, but due to the high protien content, it's likely that you are hitting an insurmountable wall as far as ease of converion goes. I have been doing some work with malting and processing barley from raw grains too, and I know that sourcing a high starch as opposed to a high protien barley is the way to go.
A high starch barley is typically reffered to as "malting barley" and high protien "feed barley". No doubt some of you already know this, and I suspect you also know that this is the key to your difficulties in converting the feed grade flaked barley you have been able to source.
I did my best to source the lowest protien barley avalilable to me, and I found it as a whole grain which worked well for me as i desired to malt raw grain as well.
When malted, even the poorest grains have a certian amount of diastatic power, and are able to convert starches to fementable sugars, this is fine if you are using these grains for malt, -if you are trying to use them to convert unmodified grains. Using these with a low protien, high starch variety of your grain of choice is a great way to access the fermentabe grain sugars for alcohol production.
until next time.........
Swede.
(i will continue this thread step by step outlining the malting and curing process i use for modifying barley.)