Malting biochemistry

Abstract

The previous chapter on malting technology viewed barley and malt as a population of kernels and used collective terms such as grain bed to describe this population. The measurements used and the concerns addressed dealt with larger issues, both in principle and in dimension, than malting biochemistry deals with. Malting can be effectively and usefully thought of on the larger scale, for example, for engineering new plant, economics of production, blending for specification and so on. However, germination, and the hydrating and dehydrating activities that precede and follow it, are not collective events but occur in each individual kernel, and it is only at that level that the biology of malting can be addressed and understood, because modification (the term for all those changes that accrue in malt as it develops from barley) occurs in each separate kernel. Moreover, the extent to which each kernel behaves in the same way as all other kernels determines the evenness of the malt. With the possible exception of acrospire growth and some staining techniques, which are measured on relatively few kernels, there is no practical measure for ker-nel-to-kernel Variation in a batch of malt. All measures used in practice enumerate the quality of a population of kerneis.