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 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I have similar situation (but right now I have ~20 kg of oats, there are other stuffs around too, I just happened to take oats), so I'm trying to build some decent malting equipment. Unfortunately, doing it outdoors in winter is sad enterprise, but I'm totally just giving it a try when I can! (Doing it indoors would be either stinky or loud, and I already have too many microbiological stuff going in same space) I do not believe I'll lose much except for conversion rate and sugar content, but might discover some new flavor tones. When I'm done, I'll be posting here and trying to share the product.

So I urge you to do the same!

There is no reason to expect that something will not ferment well just because it was not purebred for brewing. Even random yeasts mostly yield good results. Well, yeast is much more definitive in final profile and you CAN screw up by using some really stinky or low fermenting yeast. Grain, on the other hand, is just yeast food and grain flavour mostly (yes, there are other things to fine tune, but first order approximations is what we should care about in experimentation). Does it smell and taste good? Then go for it!

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

Thanks. i’ll post my results here, i’ll try to be as thourough as possible.