US Sourced Malted Barley Flour

Just wondering if folks here had any ideas I hadn't thought of. I'm about to embark on making gojuchang the *hard* way and I need malted barley flour. Not milled malt, not dry malt extract... malted barley flour. I know I need to get the goun gochugaru and meju karu (fermented soy flour) from Korean sources but I'd sure like to use a good malt from closer to home just on principle. I see that Montana Milling seems to make a malted flour product, but they are wholesale only and I need like 2kg. Local co-op wasn't any help. Anyone here have any clues or leads?

Hey spoperpro, I recall that you live on the coast near SF. How are things there with today's tsunami?

I keep looking for action… but mostly the ocean just looks a little funny. I think they are saying 1-3ft surges here, but I’m not going down closer to check for myself.

Hopefully everyone got the message to stay off the beaches and out of the water.

These folks are about 40 minutes South of me and they mill a variety of grains. If they don’t have what you’re looking for, I bet they might be able to help you with a source.

https://weatherburyfarm.com/

I thought Anson Mills would have it for sure but looks like they don't - https://ansonmills.com/

Quick side note, their work in restoring lost grain varietals has been shown in Mind of a Chef on PBS which is quite good.

Did you call Central Milling (In Petaluma)? They don't have malted barley on their site but I bet the could help hook you up.

Is it possible or even plausible to mill flour from malted barley originally intended for the brewing industry?

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Originally Posted by zetroc

Is it possible or even plausible to mill flour from malted barley originally intended for the brewing industry?

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Other malted grains are pretty available, and malted barley doesn't know what it's intended for. But yeah, it seems malted barley flour is pretty damn rare.

However... I did find some traditional gochujang recipes that use coarsely ground malt, which is exactly what brewers use. I think there's a lot of leeway here because the purpose of the barley is to contribute some starch and some protein to help fermentation, but it's really there for the amylase to convert starch from the rice. I guess some folks use koji, but my understanding is that the trad homebrew way is to use barley.

So I think i'll be picking up some adrmiral maltings gallahgers best, a dry farmed barley produced by UC davis, grown in the central valley, and malted in alameda and having it crushed. Plan is to start the gochujang in march. Probably going to take 5-6 months. If it works, and you're local I'll share (looking at you Steve).

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Originally Posted by zetroc

Is it possible or even plausible to mill flour from malted barley originally intended for the brewing industry?

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Very definitely yes. The process of malting greatly increases friability dues to changes in starch structure.

The difficulty is that barley is always malted with the husk in place while wheat is malted without. Milling malted wheat to flour is therefore much easier than milling malted barley.

Unless you have an expensive multiroller mill with intermediate sieves you aren't going to do barley. If you do have one of them you're not going to do small runs.

To the OP: go to your local home brew shop that mills grain to order and buy some milled ale malt.

Put this through a #10 sieve to remove the majority of the husk then run it through a coffee grinder set for filter. Put it through a #20 sieve then run it through a coffee grinder set for espresso.


FWIW I used to run the test lab at a maltings, we used a Mazzer mini to grind unmalted barley to save wear on our expensive Buhler diag disc mill, so the malt won't harm the coffee grinder at all.

Very interesting, thank you, Mr. Kelly.

There is a company here that malts for the brewing industry, Admiral Maltings. They also have a tasting room where they show off their customers' products. It's a nice place to sit and have a beer on a sunny day.

https://admiralmaltings.com/

I'm sure they have a minimum order but you never know.

I am late in updating this—my apologies.

Mark was right, but no need to worry about filtering. I got some pale 2-row at the brew shop, crushed it in the community machine, and got to it. Made “malt tea” just fine. Added the rest of the stuff, loaded it up and waited for 5 months.

Attachment 122806

I dutifully uncovered and left in the sun each sunny day, but did have a string of bad (foggy and dripping) weather at the end that caused some issues. I scrapped and discarded quite a bit off the top for safety and put it in jars. It’s good! Much, much less sweet, more earthy and complex than stuff at the grocery store. I’m going to give it another go this summer with a tiny bit more moisture in the initial batch.