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ARS Home » Midwest Area » Madison, Wisconsin » Cereal Crops Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #67538
Title: MALTING AND MALT QUALITY ANALYSIS AT THE USDA CEREAL CROPS RESEARCH UNIT

Author
item Budde, Allen
item Jones, Berne

Submitted to: Journal of the American Society of Brewing Chemists
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: 2/5/1996
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: At the USDA, Cereal Crops Research Unit (Barley and Malt Laboratory) in Madison, we prepare malt and measure the malting quality of early general barley lines developed by all of the public sector barley breeders across the U.S. In the past, industry wanted faster-malting, higher amylolytic enzyme malting barleys. To distinguish these lines from among the approximately 4,000 samples we analyze each year, we routinely undermodified the samples, assuming that under these conditions only the fastest modifying lines would show high quality. Recently, however, industry has decided the Diastatic Power (DP) and alpha-amylase levels of present cultivars are high enough, and should not be increased. We have therefore altered our malting procedure to produce well-modified malts that more closely reflect the malting quality values that the lines will give when malted commercially. This presentation will discuss the changes we have made and how these alterations affected the DP, alpha-amylase, extract, soluble protein and beta-glucan levels of the samples. Changing the steep schedule resulted in significantly increased DP and alpha-amylase values, together with decreased wort beta-glucan levels for the malts. We will also discuss how we have changed our method for comparing the overall malting quality of the lines we analyze.