A Case Study: Benchtop Malting System for Early-Generation Malt Quality Screening

Authors: RANI, HEENA - University Of Arkansas; Walling, Jason; Whitcomb, Sarah

Submitted to: Journal of the American Society of Brewing Chemists
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 4/22/2026
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary: The process of developing improved malting barley varieties is slow and costly. The breeding component alone from initial cross to the point of public release can take over 10 years and the costs incurred when coupled with the necessary full-scale malt quality testing can exceed several thousand dollars per year. Malt quality testing while not overtly technical, does involve several processes that are unfamiliar to most analytical labs and requires specialized equipment that can be difficult to acquire and costly to purchase and as a result samples are sent to costly malt quality labs. For these reasons malt quality testing represents a significant bottle neck in the process, particularly in the early stages of barley variety development when the numbers of samples needing testing are in the thousands. Here we evaluate the notion of circumventing costly malt quality labs used for full-scale malt testing and instead employ a simple and low-cost benchtop system that while it doesn’t perfectly mimic industrial malting, does allow for the generation of malted barley at a fraction of the price and can be assembled using common place equipment. Toward that goal we tested 45 unique barleys samples by comparing the quality of the malt produced using both our full-scale malting equipment and then on the low-cost benchtop system. We demonstrate that producing early generation barley malts using a low-cost benchtop system achieves a comparable quality level as those full-scale systems housed in established barley malt labs albeit while avoiding the high costs, labor, and prolonged turnaround time that is common with malting labs.

Technical Abstract: Accelerating genetic gains in malting barley requires efficient and accurate evaluation of malt quality traits early in breeding process. However, traditional micro-malting is limited by its high resource demand and large sample requirements. This study assessed the reliability of a low-cost benchtop malting method for determining malt quality metrics on a diverse panel of 45 two-row barley breeding lines and compared the results to those from traditional micro-malting. Significant genotypic variation was observed for all quality parameters. Strong correlations between benchtop and micro-malting methods were found for diastatic power (r = 0.82), total malt protein (r = 0.86), and malt extract (r = 0.77). Free amino nitrogen (r = 0.64), ß-glucan (r = 0.65), and a-amylase (r = 0.61) exhibited moderate correlations. Suspecting that some correlations initially scored as “moderate” may have resulted from differences in post-malting analytical protocols rather than malting methods themselves, a subset of 15 genotypes was reanalyzed using identical post-malting protocols. Under these conditions, correlation strength increased for all malt quality parameters. Overall, the benchtop malting system, coupled with plate-reader-based analytical methods, is cost-effective, scalable, and well-suited for early-generation screening of both contemporary and experimental/non-traditional grains, enabling earlier data-driven selection decisions in malting barley breeding pipelines.