by r.c.barstud » Thu Jun 27, 2013 1:52 pm
ok, i had put up a post on another thread about liquid malt extract, this is the same post, I just copied it from there and pasted it here. keep in mind, this is how I do it, there are hundreds of ways of doing this, when i worked at Jack Daniels, i had seen some fucked up, tossed up and never come down ways on how to malt and peat, i have even seen people bury the soaked grains in horse/cow crap for a slow yet consistant heat :scared-eek: :scared-eek: :scared-eek: so here is the cut and paste
Ok, this is how I do my malting. There are numerous ways of doing this, but I find this is by far the quickest and easiest, taking into account I live in the tropics, so I don’t get any mould delemas, or delayed starting.
• I weigh out my grain and allow 10% extra (just in case)
• I then soak my grain in a bucket with clean water for 24 hours and remove any ka ka runja that floats to the surface
• I soak old potato sacks thoroughly and soak the ground until the water pools around the area im using
• Spread the soaked grain evenly onto the potato sacks and cover with some hessian and soak again. (the top covering hessian cant be too thick so that the sunlight cant penetrate it)
• Keep the grain moist, not soaked, I rarely have to re-wet the grain, cause pre-soaking the ground really well and capillary action from the top layer of hessian will draw up the water
• 4 days later, walla !!! you will have perfect malt.
Peating, once again, there are lots of ways to do this.
• I use a slightly modified fish smoker, instead of the tray, I use some crim safe, it’s a stainless steel woven mesh that works just great for peating, remember, you will need to remove the powder coating from the mesh, I used a sand blaster, usually it wont cost you anything to get somebody to blast it if you bribe them with a bottle………
• I use some busted arse peat from bunnings, its about $9 a kilo
• Soak the peat for a few hours in some clean water and then fluff it up and place it under the fish smoker
• Spread the moist grain evenly onto the mesh of the smoker and light the peat
• The peat will just smolder away and the smoke/heat will penetrate and circulate the grain giving you peated malt
Points to remember
• Weigh the crim safe mesh, just the mesh and nothing else
• Don’t get things above 50 deg C
• Vary your smoke output for different drying/smoke ratios, the tighter the soaked peat the slower it will smolder (more smoke), the more open the peat the hotter but less smoke
• This is where you need to remember you required grain weight, some recipes require say 18% moisture, so if you had 1 kilo of grain and it needed to be at 18% it would need to weigh 1.18 kilos. Place the grain and mesh onto the scales and subtract the weight of the mesh and keep a tally on the grain weights as you go.
For malt I cheat a bit here, I use a food dehydrator, they are cheap and work just great, they don’t get hot enough to denature the malt and it saves a bit of time, you could use the oven to dry out the malted grain, as long as you don’t go over critical temperature (65 deg C).
De-husking, well I just use a garden sieve, a good shake, rattle and roll and ya done, ready for processing.