Making beer completely from scratch starting from raw barley

I was wondering if anyone here had made beer completely from scratch - starting with raw barley, malting it yourself, and then going through a typical all-grain brewing recipe?

What was the process that you used? What method did you use to sprout the barley? How did you dry or roast it? Do you know what a good amount of barley to work with at a time would be if I wanted to try drying it in my home oven? Any other wisdom to share about the process? Recipes?

Happen to have a lot of spare time?

I have sprouted wheat before in a 1gallon glass jar. Took a few days, with rinsing twice a day. Once sprouted, I would than try to dry out the grains. This took a considerable amount of time because the grains expand when sprouted. We have these large aluminum pans which are about 30 inches by 30 inches. With the grains spread out about 1 inch think it still took considerable amount of time. Mind you spreading a 1gallon jar out requires two of these large pans. The grains would dry better with it not being a solid bottom. Almost like a metal drying rack where the heat could circulate through the grains.

I was making sprouted grains for easy to use flour which didn't require soaking. I did it for maybe a year and now no longer do it. It was ok in the summer because i could dry the grains out in the sun. However in the winter, our wood stove isn't quite ideal, and the huge propane stove eats well propane.

So to me if you plan to do this for a long time i would suggest researching what micro brewers do.. I doubt most of them even sprout and malt their own.....


I mostly stick to meads and fruit. Apple cider. Real easy to put some honey together with some water and add in what you like.

Kate Downham wrote:I was wondering if anyone here had made beer completely from scratch - starting with raw barley, malting it yourself, and then going through a typical all-grain brewing recipe?

What was the process that you used? What method did you use to sprout the barley? How did you dry or roast it? Do you know what a good amount of barley to work with at a time would be if I wanted to try drying it in my home oven? Any other wisdom to share about the process? Recipes?

First thing first cool!

I would recommend reading the book "The Homebrewer's Garden: How to Easily Grow, Prepare, and Use Your Own Hops, Malts, Brewing Herbs" by Joe Fisher and Dennis Fisher. See link for more information https://www.amazon.com/Homebrewers-Garden-Easily-Prepare-Brewing/dp/1580170102

It does talk cover how to grow malt and brew with grains and other herbs. I have not malted my own grain but I would like to do it some day! Another source on malted would be https://byo.com/. It is a beer magazine and here is a link to home malting https://byo.com/article/malting-your-own-techniques/

I have brewed many all grain beers and there is a lot of hot water and heavy lifting involved so please remember to be safe!  

We also want to do this, we are currently looking for land to plant a spring barley crop. I've been brewing all grain wheat beers, but with imported malt. Hopefully by next fall I have some grain to practice malting with, as intimidating as it is, grain to glass is our goal. Although I don't have experience to share with you, we can share the journey!

As far as low tech malting, I've heard of people malting in under the bed storage bins, and drying on screen panels with the aid of fans, and that's probably the way I'll go when I can start doing that. Because you're home brewing you don't need to worry about the consistency that factories need, your batches can vary a little. At least I tell myself this for encouragement.

The type of beer you want to brew will also determine what kinds of malt you want to make. So if you're only making beers with basic malt bills, you don't need to worry about roasting crystal or caramel malts. But I want to try to make them anyways, and I'd like to try to malt brown rice too.

What kinds of beer do you want to make, and what's inspiring you to grow your own beer?

Kate Downham wrote:I was wondering if anyone here had made beer completely from scratch - starting with raw barley, malting it yourself, and then going through a typical all-grain brewing recipe?

What was the process that you used? What method did you use to sprout the barley? How did you dry or roast it? Do you know what a good amount of barley to work with at a time would be if I wanted to try drying it in my home oven? Any other wisdom to share about the process? Recipes?

If you are just looking for advice on how to do your project, you might want to ignore the rest of this post. (BTW, are you already growing your own hops?) If you are still in the 'should I do this?' phase, here's my experience. I tracked down a grower selling some 2-row malting barley that had been bred at UW-Madison for the climate in southern Wisconsin. The best malting barley generally comes from Canada, further south it usually produces characteristics more suitable for feed/fodder.

I calculated the amount of grain I would need to grow enough for a 5-gallon batch (from info in the Homebrewer's Garden book T mentions) and planted it. It seemed to be doing okay (I had no experience with grain crops, just regular veggies) after a month or two when I found that after multiple 'jailbreaks' by the landlord's donkeys from their pen had made them barley connoisseurs. I saved a few of the remaining grains planning to re-establish the crop over the next few years, but the whole prospect became destined for the deep annals of adventure gardening.

In the meantime, I had multiple years of massive fruit pressings from a neighbor's orchard with my cider press. It was easy and rewarding to get dozens and dozens of gallons of apple/pear cider each year in about the same time I had put into my failed beer experiment. I also got a product to share with my gluten abstaining friends, and a few year's supply of some damn good apple cider vinegar, all made from ingredients produced within a mile of my front door.

I also participated in a tour of the Briess malting facility in Eastern Wisconsin, one of the primary suppliers of organic malts and who I've bought most of my brewing ingredients from. The owner was there and described to me how he had grown a sample batch near his yard, used the company machinery to cultivate and harvest it, and his know-how from the larger facility to sprout and roast the grains in his kitchen. My impression was that he was greatly satisfied with the results of his 'estate' beer, and that he was unlikely to tackle such a project again soon.

This all forced me to recognize that beer is very much a product of the industrial machinery, a nod to  bureaucratic organization. Brewing from scratch is a bit of a masochistic endeavour, an alternative to mountain climbing. In line with what Jordan opines, ciders, meads, wines and everything in between lend themselves much better to the independent artisan wishing to work closer to the source material. I enjoy beer as a default in my current setting, but moving forward toward more permaculture goals will involve more of the other beverages (and less of them overall)...

K Kat wrote:The type of beer you want to brew will also determine what kinds of malt you want to make. So if you're only making beers with basic malt bills, you don't need to worry about roasting crystal or caramel malts. But I want to try to make them anyways, and I'd like to try to malt brown rice too.

My impression is that crystal/caramel malts are modern shortcuts to giving more body and other qualities to the beer. If you go this route, you might want to make a batch with basic malts the first time. I think there's a fair chance more rustic malt production would produce interesting qualities such that you might not need specialty malts to flesh out the results...

Hello - I live in MI and have been a member of a brewing club for 2 decades now.  We had a farmer's advocate organization out to our club before the pandemic who specialized in helping farmers match grains with an emphasis on the grain used for brewing.  One of the comments mentioned grain south of Canada was not ideal for brewing.  Maybe once upon a time, but from their outreach (through the Michigan State University, iirc), they matched grains with the farms up and down the state, identifying what works best for the microclimate of each farm, and providing a local resource for local farm to table breweries to boot.  Basically, it might be worth checking with an agricultural extension in your area or locate farmers who grow barley near you to identify the best types.  Many of my friends have grown and malted small amounts, nothing more than a bag of grain in the end.  There are lots of factors contributing to the protein content, etc. and it was one of those labors of love that they swore never to do again.  

I don't believe hops were mentioned yet, but hops are a great perennial that can be grown in many areas in North America.  Many of the varieties are now resistant to issues that plagued the industry going back to the 1600's, which resulted in hop growing moving from the NE to the midwest (MI) to the PNW.  There are also "new" North American varieties that can grow in more environments than just the North.  Once established, hops can be very prolific and can also be a nuisance if they get out of control.  I have a small hop garden with 10 plants that can provide me and friends with enough hops for a year.  To process them, I pick the flowers when ripe/dry, spread over screens in the garage with a fan blowing to dry them, then use a wooden axe handle to compress them into a PVC pipe.  Once compressed, move them carefully in the puck shape into freezer bags (I use mylar) and vacuum out the air.  They stay like that until I need them.

Malted and dried grains are good for simple recipes and lighter beers.  If you roast them, then it starts developing the caramel characteristics that provide color, flavors, and mouthfeel through the darkening of the grains.  This helped speed up the process, rather require decoction (where a portion of the mash is removed and boiled to carmalize the sugars, and then returned to the mash).  Boiling long also helps darken the beer and more melanoiden production, which makes the beer have more flavor/character/color, too.  

Let me preface by saying I know little about brewing, but is it even necessary to dry the malted barley if you move it directly into brewing after sprouting it?  Is it possible that drying is just so the malted barley can be stored, shipped, etc?

I make beer. I just finished one, it's carbonating right now. I am about to make another batch to use up a recipe kit I have and create some space.

I also have a ton of barley I purchased for Japanese fermentation such as miso... Maybe I will have to try this.

Coydon Wallham wrote:
My impression is that crystal/caramel malts are modern shortcuts to giving more body and other qualities to the beer. If you go this route, you might want to make a batch with basic malts the first time. I think there's a fair chance more rustic malt production would produce interesting qualities such that you might not need specialty malts to flesh out the results...

That makes a lot of sense, this year I brewed and tasted my first all grain beer using 100% of the grain bill, undiluted with other stuff. I had no idea beer could be that good. Since the pandemic started I've been trying several foodstuffs non factory version for the first time in my life, and I've realized I've been eating a lot of garbage thinking it was the original flavor.

If I can make decent, even just adequate, basic malts I'll be happy with that!

Gray Henon wrote:Let me preface by saying I know little about brewing, but is it even necessary to dry the malted barley if you move it directly into brewing after sprouting it?  Is it possible that drying is just so the malted barley can be stored, shipped, etc?

I've never malted anything, nor brewed from green malt. But listening to beer podcasts I thought I heard of someone doing what you're mentioning. I'd like to try mashing without drying at least once. But the malting takes a few days and you'd need to brew as soon as your grains were ready, you'd have to organize your life around your beer making. Honestly the 2-3 day soaking and draining schedule seems like the most difficult part compared to drying so I'm not sure how much time and effort you'd be saving in the end. And drying helps to remove the rootlets...

I still think it's worth a try, I've heard the fresher the malt is, the better. And you could save water too.

Kate Downham wrote:I was wondering if anyone here had made beer completely from scratch - starting with raw barley, malting it yourself, and then going through a typical all-grain brewing recipe?

What was the process that you used? What method did you use to sprout the barley? How did you dry or roast it? Do you know what a good amount of barley to work with at a time would be if I wanted to try drying it in my home oven? Any other wisdom to share about the process? Recipes?

I go through about 5kg of malt when I make one 20L bucket batch of beer. You lose weight when your grains sprout so if you want to make enough for one batch you'll need to add extra to end up with the right weight, there's a calculation for this somewhere. From what I've heard, ovens are tricky because they don't go low enough to match the temps of grain kilns and waste a lot of power running them open for such a long time. I'm planning to remove one of my sliding door screen panels, clean it well, then dry my malt on the screen propped on boxes or chairs with a fan positioned to blow on it. There's a WordPress blog called "brewing beer the hard way" and I plan on following his method for malting at home.

As with a lot of things, especially permaculture related, modern takes on old tasks are often tackled single-handedly by inspired individuals because we don’t really have a way to do it otherwise. I am constantly guilty of this, I always do things “the hard way”.

The infrastructure isn’t small and communal anymore. Even on homesteads it’s usually 1 family going about it.  

I’d love to be part of a small early American village based around a water powered grain mill (bread and water, needs are covered). I really, really love those things.

With a small community tackling this it would be much easier and probably more enjoyable. Sounds amazing actually. I’m sure there’s a niche market for this too.

What unfortunate things the paved road has done to society. Our paths have been chosen for us.

Gray Henon wrote:Let me preface by saying I know little about brewing, but is it even necessary to dry the malted barley if you move it directly into brewing after sprouting it?  Is it possible that drying is just so the malted barley can be stored, shipped, etc?

The thing that will need testing here is similar to how 1 tsp of fresh pepper doesn’t remotely correlate to the potency of 1 tsp of dried pepper (being much stronger). So there’s a chance that the flavor profile of fresh malt is superior but you might need extra to counterbalance the freshness.

as an all wild-yeast meadmaker without a lot of experience (but a decent amount of understanding of the processes) with beer-making, i wonder if you’re considering being ‘from scratch’ with yeast, too, kate. i do understand that wild yeast is mostly verboten in the beer world.

I ended up finding instructions about how to malt barley in John Seymour’s self sufficiency book, and I gave this a try in a small batch. Husband liked it so much that he wants me to get a bigger pot and make a large batch.

I used 1.9kg barley, around 5 pounds. With this I made a 10L batch of bragot with honey added, and also sparged it out until I got another 5 litres for a small beer.

I put the barley in a big bowl, covered with enough water to cover it by an inch. Left it alone to soak at room temperature. Barley soaked up all the water within a few days, and I would go to it once or twice a day and then and mix it around with my hands so that the stuff on top didn’t get dried out too much. At some point all of it was looking a bit dry, so I sprinkled small amounts of water on as I mixed.

After a few days I could see little rootlets sprouting. Instructions said to kiln it once the large top sprout is 2/3 the length of the grain but had not emerged - I misinterpreted that to mean that it had come out of the grain and grown to 2/3 the length, so I left it a bit late, but it seems to have still worked fine. This process took around 11 days from the day I started the barley soaking in winter, it might be a bit faster in summer, so this is something to keep in mind if you want to make beer without kilning - it’s just a matter of timing it so that you’ll be at home to do the brewing on the right day.

Most of the grain I did not kiln, as John Seymour says that kilning is done just to help store it if you don’t want to make beer right away. I wanted to make a stout/porter kind of beer, so I did take 1/4 of it and kilned it to help get it darker, and also took a small amount of it to roast at high temperatures for flavour. The recipe I was very loosely following also called for a small amount of rolled oats, so I added some of these too.

The bottom oven of my woodstove gets too hot for kilning on its own, so I put a sheet pan at the top of it to shield the grain, put the grain in the middle of the oven, and left the door ajar, as I would for dehydrating. I mixed it around with my hands every so often, figuring if the sheet the barley was on felt too hot for my hands to touch, then it was too hot to keep the enzymes alive, it didn’t end up getting too hot.

I put the kilned, roasted, and non-kilned grain through my food processor in batches to grind it up. It didn’t get evenly milled as you’d see in purchased malt, and I also had to add water to this to help grind it. I put it all in a 10L pot with hot water at the right temperature, forgot that the recipe said to use a specific amount of water, so I just covered it with an inch or two of water.

While the grain was heating up to the right temperature I used my wooden potato masher to mash it all up - maybe this is why it’s called the mash? Was sprouted barley in early beers originally just mashed with water rather than dried and milled?

Once it was at temperature, I soaked it only for half an hour, stirring and mashing every now and then, as the bragot recipe called for only half an hour. If I do this again without the honey, I’ll soak for a full hour or overnight (River cottage booze book calls for an hour, John Seymour says overnight).

To sparge with this small amount, I used my normal stainless steel colander lined with cheesecloth and placed over a large bowl - a bucket or large pot would also do the job. I sparged until I got to 10L in total, put it back in the pot, and then attempted to boil it for an hour I think, it didn’t get rolling, as my stove was cooling down for the night, but got very hot,. Allowed it to cool for a while in the pot, and then poured into glass carboys to finish cooling. Once cooled more I sprinkled in ale yeast and shook it around.

For the small beer, it was getting late, so I just put the grain back in a different pot with some water to cover it, and heated it up as much as I could before leaving it overnight. The next day I heated it to the correct temperature, left it for a full hour, and then sparged until I got 5 litres, then boiled it and put it out to ferment as I did for the first batch.

It was very drinkable. Husband did not really like the sweetness that the honey added to the bragot and preferred the taste of the small beer, so next time I’ll do the first strong batch without any honey.

I didn’t use any hops or other bittering herbs. The bragot had some other herbs added, but I couldn’t taste them.

Now I have around 5 or 6 kilos of grain soaking to make a large batch of plain non-bragot ale. I’ll post here and let you all know how it goes. This time I might not do any kilning, but just roast a portion of it for the colour and flavour while relying on the non-kilned grain for the sweetness.

I enjoyed this process. There is so much exacting information out there that confuses things I think, but this is a process that has been done for a long time, well before recipe books existed, and even on my first go at this it still turned out reasonably well even though I did a heap of stuff different to what the recipes said to do and just improvised with kitchen gear that I already had.

greg mosser wrote:as an all wild-yeast meadmaker without a lot of experience (but a decent amount of understanding of the processes) with beer-making, i wonder if you’re considering being ‘from scratch’ with yeast, too, kate. i do understand that wild yeast is mostly verboten in the beer world.

I've read that beer is fussy about yeast too. At the moment I am still learning and using purchased ale yeast, but later down the track I'd like to experiment with a small batch using the barm leftover from another batch, or with ginger bug.

I'm glad to read about your successful malting and brewing experiment, because I am going to start doing that seriously from October.

We planted almost a half acre of barley this spring and got 400kg (poorish yield) and it's all for malting over the winter!

From the research that I've done in preparation, there's rules that the industry follows for maximum efficiency and predictable product. These rules can definitely be disregarded for homebrewers who don't need to worry so much about that or want a less arduous task.

We harvested in mid June, and I'm letting or barley rest for about three months to mimick seed dormancy before sprouting, this is supposed to improve germination rate and help it to sprout at a same rate which makes a higher quality malt.

I found the answer to why industry doesn't brew with green malt, there are chemicals present in the fresh malt that need to be aged out, if not there's a risk of the beer having a cardboard taste from these chemicals oxidizing during the brewing process. To it's recommended to age the malt for at least a few weeks for roasted malts, and a month or more for pale malts. Heat and dryness are what reduces those unfavorable compounds. Researchers were looking into ways around drying the malt to save energy and there's no easy shortcut. Now if you're not getting those off flavors when you brew, then that's great, but there's a risk of that, and probably more so in certain beers than others.

So there's a lot more waiting time than I initially expected, I won't be able to drink the barley I harvested in June until about December.

There a lot of specialty yeasts available, many are certain strains that give special flavors, such as the German or Belgian yeasts. I brew most of my beers on regular saf 05, it's an easy yeast that ferments well without being too fussy about temperature. I save the yeast trubb from the bottom of my bucket just by keeping it clean and pitch the next beer right on top of it (cooled) because I brew back to back. Like a sourdough it's wonderful if you use it often because it starts fast. I'll use it as many times as I can and only start fresh if I'm going from a dark beer to a light, or if a bug fell in. It's possible to have wild yeasts join in, it happened once and it was wonderful, but it's nice starting with a strong base of something that's really good at fermenting beer. There's people culturing and even patenting wild yeast, but I'm not ready for that yet. For less frequent Brewers there's ways to save the yeast, an easy way is in a jar in the fridge with a layer of beer on top. I've not done it, but it's supposed to keep a while that way, mine will easily wait a couple days on the floor in a sealed bucket, so it's not that hard.

I'm glad there's someone else out there brewing beer really from scratch, wish we were close enough to trade bottles!