Flaked Barley

[SHIELDS EXILE]

Has anyone tried making beer with say 75% flaked barley, as it is cheaper than pale malt, and is after all barley modified by an industrial method other than malting, and is marketed in bulk in health food shops? Beersmith reckons only to use 5% of it in a brew, why?

[legion]

Flaked barley contains no drastic power to be able to convert itself in the mash, it needs to be mashed with a high proportion of a normal base malt.

But you can still use more than 5%, lots of new England IPAs use 20% flaked oats for instance

[Dave S]

Flaked barley contains no drastic power to be able to convert itself in the mash, it needs to be mashed with a high proportion of a normal base malt.

But you can still use more than 5%, lots of new England IPAs use 20% flaked oats for instance

You're right, it won't convert without the diastatic power of base malt to help it along. You can however use quite a lot of it in the Mash. Guinness for instance uses 20% in their stout. Don't think I'd want to go any higher than that though.

[john luc]

More like 40% but as has being said you need to understand why you need Base malt. Each malt has the magic enzymes with pale Base malt having more than it needs to convert it's own starch into fermentable sugar. The other malts have some and some have Nada. Guinness used a pale malt that has rakes of extra enzymes so that their mash can contain 40% of raw barley. Sure isn't that why they keep telling us they are really craft beer, they just left out the y at the end.

[simon12]

My understanding is modern base malts have enough enzymes to convert double there own weight so in theory you could use up to 50% of any non malted grain. A longer mash could be a good idea if you want to use that much.
From https://byo.com/mead/item/94-adjuncts-explained

"Unmalted barley

Unmalted barley is used as an adjunct in several major breweries around the world. It is significantly cheaper than malted barley and can be blended at up to 50 percent, provided the enzyme levels are high and an extensive temperature-profile mashing schedule is used. It is difficult to mill as the kernels are extremely hard. It contributes a large amount of beta glucan to the wort, because this troublesome compound is reduced during malting. Beta glucan can improve foam stability, but in excess it impedes lautering."

This is just plain barley but apart from the hard to mill and maybe the temp profile mash I think it all still goes.

[Buckie Brewer]

I posted a question about this here. I believe it has to do with the lintner value (°L) of the malt in that if you know what the valve is you can then do this sum.
Lintner_for_batch = Σ(lintner_for_grain * weight_of_grain) / (total_batch_grain_weight)