How To Floor Malt Barley

Turning it into malted barley.

How to floor malt barley.

Start with a large bucket that can handle the grains plus enough water to float all of the grains. The modern factory manufacture of barley malt and sorghum malt is in principle identical to traditional malting. Add water until all of the grains are floating and let the grains sit in the water for 2 hours. 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.

Most of the 100 distilleries in scotland purchase malted barley from commercial malting plants and most all of the distilleries that do floor malting also purchase additional malt from commercial malters. 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. In a modern malt house the process is more automated and the grain is germinated on a floor that is slotted to allow air to be forced through the grain bed. 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.

The cereal is spread out on the malting floor in a layer of 8 to 12 cm 3 to 4 5 in depth. A traditional floor malting germinates the grains in a thin layer on a solid floor and the grain is manually raked and turned to keep the grains loose and aerated. Floor malting is the historic technique of preparing barley for fermentation. If your first proper distillery tour was one with floor maltings it can be a hard act to follow.

Mine was bowmore where i was taken around by the then manager jim mcewan. Floor malting offers the small brewer or distiller an opportunity to source barley from farmers in their area and turn it into malt the backbone of beer and malt whiskey. After steeping the grain the floor malting process requires the wet grain to be put on a smooth concrete floor while it germinates. The favored floor material for european floor maltings has always been tiles quarried only in the bavarian village of solnhofen.

The first step in home malting is to steep the barley in water to begin the germination process. This guide shows how traditional fl oor malting can be scaled up into a. Once properly hydrated the malt is then sent not to a germination chamber but to a floor where it is spread evenly by hand into an approximately 15 cm 6 inch thick layer. We produce small batch handcrafted malt using techniques which date back to when the malting floors were built in the 1870s.