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

Malting it for base malt is probably not worth the effort indeed (kind of weird that there are a few small-scale enterprises around where I live who try to make small batches of malt - and it's base malt. Of course it's inferior to large scale, sadly, I had sad experience trying to use super-local. Why don't they see the real market potential for weird stuff? Maybe I should take that space when I set the process?), but there are limitless potential specialty varieties you can try. Roast it differently? Skip toasting altogether and use it asap to see what happens? Reproduce some historical process? So much fun (probably).

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Barley quality depends a lot on location. I'm in Alberta and we produce a majority of the malt barley for the world because of our climate. Its used for whiskeys and beers across the globe. So if you arent getting cold winters and intense hot summers, that might be the difference.

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

Yeah, I wanted to move to Alberta many years ago to join your university and have fun with bitumen. But I'm in Finland now, so winter is ok, and now summers are intense and hot everywhere. I don't know why exactlt anybody would crop grow these grains south of here, where other things thrive. Leave hardy grasses for arctic steppes.