So you are bored, huh? Well, what about malting some maize to make some gluten-free beer?
Malting is what you need to do to grains so that you can brew with them.
The first thing to do is get some corn (maize). I get mine from the village close by in a sack and I malt about 3kg at a time. I then steep the kernels in water for eight hours at a time, drain them for eight hours and then re-soak for a total of five times. By this time, 90-95% of the maize has started to germinate.
I spread the germinating maize on some trays lined with a towel or paper and wrap everything up in plastic. I use about four trays and lay the corn between 2.5 to 5cm deep. Every twelve hours I move and jiggle the kernels around so that the rootlets don’t matt up. Depending on the temperature, this has to be done for between three to five days. When they look like this…
…I stop and spread them out to dry in the shade on a counter with a fan to help dry them…
Again, depending on the weather it can take a few days for them to turn into this…
Once the corn has dried up, I stuff it all into a pillow case and start lightly banging it against a post in the house…and I count to two thousand, that is usually long enough to knock off all the dried rootlets and growing tips from the kernels. Winnowing with a fan is the next step to separate the trash.
To add some flavour and colour while brewing, the next step is to roast some of the malted grain. I usually divide up the whole lot into thirds and roast each lot individually at different temperatures and for different times to try and get the equivalent of Chocolate, Munich or Roasted Malt. This is really a matter of experimentation to get it right but as a guideline I do the following for different types of malt:
- Vienna: 120min at 100C (212F).
- Munich: 120min at 150C (300F).
- Chocolate: 120min at 200C (400F).
And there it is, a whole week of boredom has been vanquished!!