STUDIES ON MALTING POTENTIAL AND PHYSICAL ATTRITION OF MALT AND BARLEY

Sequential pearling, pearlography and small‐scale flour milling of malts and barleys were investigated as means of better predicting malting potential. Sequential pearling was used to describe varietal differences in rates of modification during malting. Sequential pearling gave no better prediction of malting potential than simple pearling. Malts which had been “stewed” during kilning could be recognized by their behaviour during sequential pearling. A barley pearler was modified to measure the torque required to pearl samples of barley and malt, giving pearlograms of torque versus time. Many barley varieties had characteristic pearlograms, but malt pearlograms did not retain the distinctive features of their parent barleys. The pearlograms of malt were highly correlated with malting potential, whereas those from barley were not. The millability of malt correlated highly with coarse hot water extract and coarse fine difference. Both the quantity and extractability of the flour differed substantially between malts made from malting and feed varieties and were related to malting potential. The millability of the parent barley, in contrast, was not correlated with the coarse hot water extract of the malt. Although offering extra information for the description of malting quality, neither sequential pearling, pearlography nor millability offered sufficient advantage over the simple pearling method for prediction of malting potential of barleys or micromalts from a breeding programme.