Homebrewing - Beer, Mead, Wine, Cider

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A community dedicated to homebrewing beer, mead, wine, cider and everything in between. If it ferments, bring it over here.

Share recipes, ideas, ask for feedback or just advice.

Some starting points for beginners:

Introduction to Beer Brewing

A basic mead primer

Quick and diry guide to fermenting fruit - cider and wine

Brewing software

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using regular agricultural barley for making malt (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 1 week ago by nope@sopuli.xyz to c/homebrewing@sopuli.xyz

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Does anybody have experience with using regular barley used as animal feed for making malt on their own? i have an endless supply of the stuff from a friend that uses it as animal feed.

I was wondering if i really need specialized malt or would regular barley make an OK beer. I'm mostly curious and I don't want to waste time on a malt that would definitely result in a bad beer, I'm new at homebrewing and it would take up my only fermenting pot until it finishes.

any thoughts or suggestions? thanks!

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[–] nope@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

thanks for the info, i really appreciate it. i think i'll read up on barley in general and get more information. i may be able to find out what specific strain he has growing. i didn't even think about mold/ergot.

it's not really about the money, it's really about making a beer with what you have (of course i don't have hops, but that could be arranged maybe next year i guess). and a beer made from his barley would be a great gift for him i guess.

yes, i know i'll have to malt the barley first, i watched a video about that from Adam Ragusea on yt.

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Well, let me know if you have any questions about barley and I'll see if I can help. I have 30,000 bushels of it sitting in bins behind the house right now.

[–] leds 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Do you use any automatic sorting to get rid of the bed kernels? I'm wondering if industrial high speed image detection sorting machines is something you can DIY

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

I used a compressed air blowgun, the venturi style, and some screens I use to clean grain for grading and measuring. It seemed with some practice I could get it to mostly blow the light, unfilled, and mildewed kernels out, and the ergot tended to gather at the bottom. But the black ones are easy enough to see and pick out. You can screen the rest out after malting because they won't have a cotyledon and will fall through larger screens along with other ungerminated seeds.

Color sorters are hella expensive. I was looking at buying one for cleaning seed for planting. I think I was $30k for some janky one from China. I didn't pull the trigger. https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Agricultural-Machinery-Color-Sorter-Machine-Plastic_1600352731858.html

You can get small ones for a couple thousand.

[–] leds 1 points 5 days ago

I'd love a tabletob machine learning sorter, manually sort a bunch and tell it which are bad and which are good and then let it sort the rest.

[–] nope@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 week ago

Sure, thanks! Thats a lot of barley :))