Making Your Own Malt

By Wendy Tweten And Debbie Teashon
Published on September 14, 2020
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Beer has been made across cultures for thousands of years, and has especially flourished in grain-centric agricultures.
Beer has been made across cultures for thousands of years, and has especially flourished in grain-centric agricultures.
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“Gardening for the Homebrewer” by Wendy Tweten and Debbie Teashon brings the process of brewing home by detailing some of the best practices for growing, harvesting, and fermenting your own ingredients.
“Gardening for the Homebrewer” by Wendy Tweten and Debbie Teashon brings the process of brewing home by detailing some of the best practices for growing, harvesting, and fermenting your own ingredients.

Gardening for the Homebrewer (Voyageur Press, 2015), by Wendy Tweten and Debbie Teashon walks through the cultivation, harvesting, and brewing processes necessary for making beer, cider, wine, and much more. As two seasoned gardeners, Tweten and Teashon know the fulfillment of growing food for the table and for the wine cellar. Assembling a brew book as a guide, the two seasoned gardening writers share their passion for following the process from “garden to glass”, seed to stein, barley to beer, and vine to wine. No detail is spared, packing in specifics of the best growing seasons, zones, varieties, and cultivation conditions.

Why would anyone want to go through the complicated home-malting process? For the same reasons you grow the ingredients and brew your own beer, of course: qual­ity, sustainability, and your love of experimentation! Barley is the best grain to start with, though with a few tweaks to the process, other grains will work with the following method.

The good news is that, while it can be tricky, there are just a few steps to malt­ing grains (and if you are an experienced gardener, you probably already know how to germinate seeds). The best time to malt barley is from late fall to winter — depending on your basement temperature — and when you have approximately one week to complete the process. You need a room that you can keep at 50°F (10°C) or cooler. The cool temperatures keep the grain from growing a green shoot. The same tempera­tures also prevent the grain from growing mold, fungi, and mildew.

You will need:

  • Two clean 5-gallon plastic buckets, at least one with a lid
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