Floor Malting At Home

Many early malters actually spread the grains on a concrete malting floor to keep them cool and make it easy to turn them periodically.

Floor malting at home. In floor malting steeped barley is laid in piles on tiled or concrete floors and allowed to build up some heat and begin growth. You continue malting until the small leaf acrospires within the grain is approximately 80 100 of the length of the grain. Floor malting was the only method of malting in use until the 1850 s. The result surrenders the nuttiness of a vienna malt and the toffee richness of a munich malt.

Note that the acrospires is inside the grain so you need to actually split the. By the 17th century floor malting was the method being used to malt larger quantities. Mine was bowmore where i was taken around by the then manager jim mcewan. We produce small batch handcrafted malt using techniques which date back to when the malting floors were built in the 1870s.

It was largely a manual process and today floor malting is considered a niche artisanal practice. Seeing the sea of grain on the floor the smouldering bricks of peat in the kiln and the blue smoke wafting from the pagoda roof it all seemed wonderfully artisan and self contained. Formerly a farmhouse now an inn 1872 with a. If your first proper distillery tour was one with floor maltings it can be a hard act to follow.

I d recommend it to anyone considering getting into home malting or even someone that has done it for awhile. A few specialty maltsters in the uk germany and the czech republic continue to make floor malts available to brewers who prize them for the. Large malting floors were no longer necessary but power consumption was high so floor malting held on well into the twentieth century. Only a handful of traditional malting floors are still in use.

Color l 4 2 6 2 moisture max 4 5. The only book on home malting i m aware of. Ye old corner cupboard is a grade ii listed building in winchcombe. Notable malthouses in the uk.

Crisp has a long and proud tradition of producing the highest quality floor malt which continues to this day with malt still being produced in our no 19 floor malting at great ryburgh. Floor malting was the traditional way of producing malt for brewing before the industrial revolution. This book is written in a casual conversational tone with lots of nitty gritty details about the why and how of malting. The fully insulated 100 stainless steel malting vessel can process between 1 and 4 tons of raw grain and includes the agitator unloading doors manways wedgwire false floor plenum chamber aeration nozzles instrumentation and cleaning devices.

While floor malting was largely supplanted by industrial scale drum malting in the 20th century the older methods offer a hands on opportunity to produce unique malt with less equipment.