Preparing for Uncertainty and Self Reliance

[Montegriffo]

The malting process is the tricky bit really.
Get that wrong and your beer's not going to be any good.
I've never met anyone who malted their own barley on a small scale.
Involves cool, damp, dark rooms and a bit of stirring.

[Montegriffo]

Steeping the Raw Barley

The first step in home malting is to steep the barley in water to begin the germination process. Start with a large bucket that can handle the grains plus enough water to float all of the grains. Add water until all of the grains are floating, and let the grains sit in the water for 2 hours.

Remove the grains from the water (a strainer is good for this) and let the grains air out and dry for about 8 hours. This step is important as if you leave the grains in the water they will drown and eventually die.

After the grains have dried for about 8 hours, steep them again in a clean batch of water for another two hours, and dry them again for 8 hours. You will likely have to continue this for a third cycle. Within 24 hours of starting, you should see small roots start to grow from the base of the kernel (called chits). Stop your cycles of steeping and drying once you have 95% of the grains germinated.

You should have added approximately 40-45% moisture (water) at this point. Assuming you started the dry grains with ~9-10% moisture content, adding 35% moisture will result in a weight gain as follows: 1 kg of grain has ~100 g of water before steeping. Adding 350g of water (45% water content) results in a total of 1.35kg. So if you started with a given weight of grains, you can stop steeping when the grains weigh 30-35% more than when you started.
Germinating the Grains

The grains must now be germinated in a cool, slightly moist, but well ventilated area to grow the small leaflet inside the grain called an acrospire. This generally takes 2-5 days. The ideal temperature for germination is 64F, or about 18C.

You want to keep the seeds cool, spread them out well and moisten them periodically with a little spray mist. The germination process generates heat, which can lead to bacteria or mold growth so its important to aerate the grains and turn them every few hours in a cool location to avoid infction. Many early malters actually spread the grains on a concrete “malting floor” to keep them cool and make it easy to turn them periodically.

You continue malting until the small leaf (acrospires) within the grain is approximately 80-100% of the length of the grain. Note that the acrospires is inside the grain, so you need to actually split the grain open with a knife or razor blade and look for the white leaf that is part of the endosperm and attached to the rootlets. Typically the external portion of the rootlet will be about 2x the length of the grain when it is finished, but checking the actual acrospire length is the best method to determine when to stop.
Drying the Malt

Drying the malt can be difficult as it requires a steady temperature of between 90-125F (31-50C). Drying at a higher temperature will destroy the enzymes needed for mashing. If you are fortunate enough to have an oven with temperature control that can go this low, then leaving it in the oven for ~24 hours is an excellent way to go. In some cases, even the oven light is sufficient to reach the 90F temperature needed, though it may take some time to finish.

If you live in a sunny dry climate, sun drying is also an option. Some care is needed to keep birds and other small scavengers away, but you can leave it out in the sun for 2 days which should be sufficient to dry the malt.

http://beersmith.com/blog/2009/12/05/ma ... n-at-home/

[Speaker to Animals]

The malting process is the tricky bit really.
Get that wrong and your beer's not going to be any good.
I've never met anyone who malted their own barley on a small scale.
Involves cool, damp, dark rooms and a bit of stirring.

The thing is.. if you can manage it, it would be an apex prep, since most people love beer and there wouldn't likely be any beer in a collapse. Every brewery uses inputs from specialists like malters and grain farmers.

Lots of folks can make wine from scratch, and almost as many can make whiskey from scratch. Making beer from scratch? That would be rare.

The other factor here is that beer goes bad. Whiskey and wine can be stored for a long time. Beer not so much. So not only would there likely be nobody able to produce it from absolute scratch, the existing stocks would only last so long, making supply near zero after a year or so.

But even if you get the malting down right, and you are able to develop the perfect barley and hops seeds for your property, you still have to figure out temperature control. The reason early American brewers planted their roots in Milwaukee and Colorado was access to abundant ice from Lake Michigan or from the rocky mountains. There are so many factors.

Then consider the difficulty of getting your agricultural side up and running. Typically, to get decent grains for your area that are not GMO, you have to track down LOTS of different strains of seeds, mix them up, and for at least several years constantly sow them until you get a perfect hybrid adapted to your local environment.

So you would need to basically start this prep up as a brewing hobby that you can hopefully monetize amongst your friends and family, or use as barter in the meantime. It would be significant work, but the payoff if there were a collapse, in my opinion, would be immense.

That is not an ability that people can really plunder. You are the guy who knows how to make it all work and has years of experience making this system produce beer without external inputs. Nobody is going to want to lose their beer..

[Speaker to Animals]

I think in terms of ease (for me anyway), a more useful prep would be to develop the ability to start the mead production process in the Spring, and maybe whiskey production in the fall when the rye is harvested. Both of those things take time to develop, so you'd also have to get it up and running as a hobby beforehand, but the difficulty in producing those two goods without external inputs is not nearly as high as producing beer.

I was actually surprised at how much more complex beer brewing is compared to making wines and liquor.

Though, I still think I will learn brewing beer (with hops and malt I purchase) just because it interests me.

[Speaker to Animals]

I think step 1 is to simultaneously work on just producing a regular bread production without any external inputs while developing your brewery. Then slowly try to eliminate the inputs to your beer using what you learned in your wheat and bread program (probably starting with the hops and any other additives, making barley and malting your final challenge).

Bread is much more forgiving and allows you to learn to develop the wheat strain for your immediate environment. It also teaches you how to develop a yeast culture and keep it going over time, at a much reduced difficulty level, I suspect.

If you have goats or dairy cows, you could run a similar program for cheeses.

Products like those, traditionally, were valued highly in the past before the industrial revolution. A frontier community, for instance, would set out to produce a basic subsistence of food, but would very soon afterward develop bread, whiskey, beer, cheese, etc. Also, those were among the most heavily bartered goods.

[Montegriffo]

Beer bottled live, ie secondary fermentation in the bottle, will keep for years. Not quite indefinitely but for as long as the bottle stays airtight.
In barrels (especially wooden ones) you can't keep them airtight enough or the pressure from CO2 production will blow them open, they have to be vented with a porous spile peg.
Most beer in cans goes off because of the beer dissolving the aluminium rather than spoiling.
Unless you bottled beer has sediment in it it's not live and won't last as long but it will keep for quite a while.

[Montegriffo]

I think step 1 is to simultaneously work on just producing a regular bread production without any external inputs while developing your brewery. Then slowly try to eliminate the inputs to your beer using what you learned in your wheat and bread program (probably starting with the hops and any other additives, making barley and malting your final challenge).

Bread is much more forgiving and allows you to learn to develop the wheat strain for your immediate environment. It also teaches you how to develop a yeast culture and keep it going over time, at a much reduced difficulty level, I suspect.

If you have goats or dairy cows, you could run a similar program for cheeses.

Products like those, traditionally, were valued highly in the past before the industrial revolution. A frontier community, for instance, would set out to produce a basic subsistence of food, but would very soon afterward develop bread, whiskey, beer, cheese, etc. Also, those were among the most heavily bartered goods.

You can also make beer with the bread that doesn't come out very good.
https://moonshiners.club/bread-beer-recipe/

[Montegriffo]

If you want to become the local beer Baron post SHTF you probably aught to keep a shelf full of beer kits, which are just concentrated malt and hops, in your bunker.

[Speaker to Animals]

If you want to become the local beer Baron post SHTF you probably aught to keep a shelf full of beer kits, which are just concentrated malt and hops, in your bunker.

See, that's where I think preppers fuck it all up.

The common prepping strategy is to stock up on shit. Freeze-dried food. Supplies. Etc.

But that's not really preparing for self-reliance at all. That's just creating a buffer so you a bit of time to figure shit out. It's not really enough to simply have a pantry full of freeze-dried food that can last you a year. When that year is up, then what?

I think your goal should be to get away from large cities, number one, since those places are death. But just as importantly you need to start building something like a homestead where your external dependencies are minimized. The ability to reliably produce a good year after year without depending upon external inputs is true self-reliance.

If you want to include alcohol as a prep, then consider liquor stocks as merely a hedge, not really a viable strategy in of itself. On the other hand, if you develop the skills and means to produce whiskey on your own property, then that is a true prep. From day one you are producing something, not merely running on the fumes of your sacrificing income during better years.

[Montegriffo]

Buys you time to get your shit together though.
Saves a lot of time and effort when you've got feeding yourself to worry about.
Better start collecting bottles too unless you have time for glass blowing or stoneware jug making.