Malting at Home Guide

For anyone who is interested, I published a condensed guide on Bodensatz (The Beer Site) about malting at home. If you like, you can click here to to have a look at the guide. There are lots of pictures and step-by-step instructions. I hope that some of you homebrewers find it useful, whether you are in the Philippines or not.

The malting is going well and the barley is fully modified and in the sun drying as I write. The system is getting more efficient as I learn. See the photo at left. That is fully modified.

I've been thinking lately and because I am always in the mood to experiment, I have come up with two possible experiments.

Experiment #1:
I had a Cali Shandy the other day and very much enjoyed it. I would like to try to brew something along the lines of a pineapple accented beer. If anyone has any recipes please let me know. My guess would be to add some fresh pineapple to the wort, but I am not sure how the citric acid would effect the wort pH. Probably it wouldn't lower it enough to be of a concern. Yeast like a lower pH environment of between 5.2 and 5.6.

Experiment #2:
We eat a lot of ampalaya and grow it in the garden here. I tasted some ampalaya leaf the other day and noticed a similarity with fresh hops; super bitter that is. I want to add some ampalaya leaves to the boil on my next batch. Maybe I'll split the boil into two and try some with ampalaya and some without.
We'll see how my 10 litre batch goes. It's clearing now. We may be able to bottle soon.

Maltster... over.