Crushed Malt Storage

[Qs]

Anyone got some tips on storing big bags (up to 25kg) of crushed base malts and smaller bags of speciality malts?

And how long before they're no good any more?

[Damien M]

As with most things air is bad as it will oxidise and with moisture it will rot! ( perhaps a bit dramatic!)  Uncrushed Malt is sealed with in a nice little (mostly) air tight package and thus is best.

So with crushed, I would suggest parceling it up into batch size packages and getting as much air out of the bag ( vac Sealer perhaps) as possible and storing it in as dry/stable environment as possible. Just to note when your parceling it out try in keep it mixed/uniform as possible as you could end up with a bag of husks at the start and a bag of Malt dust at the end. 

As regards how long the will last. Taste them now and note what you percieve and do a similar test each time you use or 3 - 6 month intervals. Noting oxidised flavours, loss of flavours, mouldy smells/flavours.

[Will_D]

+1 on the above

Also like beers: Aviod wild fluctuations of temperature and humidity!

Cool, Dry, Dark is best. If storing where "fury friends" abound then plastic bins with a tight but not airtight lid would protect your grains.

Same also goes for whole grain

BTW: A long time ago my dad had a job with the Ministry of Food(UK) managing emergency food stores in UK. These stored "hugh" quatities of flour and sugar in case of WW III. They were called Buffer Depots and in the late 60s stored up to half a million tons of flour, sugar, and other essentials.

Milled flour ( in 140lb sacks ) were stored in rat proof sheds for believe it or not 10 years. The flour was then sent of to the mills (RHM) to be processed and used for bread making!

Even more unbelievable was that 50 kgs sacks of white sugar were sometimres stored OUTSIDE on pallets under tarpaulins also for 10 years. The sticky mess was then sent of to Tate and Lyle for re-refinning into table sugar. This is where I got my fear of spiders! You should have seen the size of the criters under the sugar stacks.

[Qs]

Cool, Dry, Dark is best. If storing where "fury friends" abound then plastic bins with a tight but not airtight lid would protect your grains.

Oh not air tight, thats interesting? I had assumed air tight would be preferable.

[Will_D]

Malt is, believe it or not, still alive. If you steep malted whole base grains they will often germinate again!

I have not seen this myself but it was mentioned by a speaker at the 2013 Altech conference!

Any way grain should be allowed to breath!

Unless its vacuum packed.

[fergus]

Plastic bins is solid advice. And it's not just the furry critters you need to be concerned about. Weevils, or more specifically grain weevils are little feckers once they get in. I got an infestation from a bag of bird seed believe it or not. Had it in the basement along with about 90kg of my brewing grain. Thankfully they didn't find my grain but after that I moved all my grain into sealable plastic bins. Spent the next 2 months killing weevils as they tried to migrate elsewhere in the house. The dog helped and ate them from time to time

[johnrm]

Any way grain should be allowed to breath!
Unless its vacuum packed.

Surely that is a contradiction.
Air in a vacuum is going to be minimal.

[Damien M]

An observation: I was tidying up my grain store over the past week and chucking very old or stale tasting grain.  I have been building up a collection of storage devices and am finding the most effective is when there is the minimum amount of light and air changes at or near the grain is most effective. I have been using bot h IKea Clear boxes to Industrial type blue barrels and the blue barrels have a number of advantages mostly obvious light restrictive, top entry but having a vessel that has some air space above the grain allows it to breath as Will_D mentioned with out major air changes when grain taken out. Another thing is to leave the grain in the sack it came in as this also acts as buffer to reduce air changes and still allow the grain breath. I had about 7 kg of Larger malt in a clear IKEA box without sack that had gone soft where as same age Stout malt still held its crunch in a Blue barrel!

On the comment of Vacuum and grain breathing  I reckon darker kilned malts have a much lower moisture content and thus benefit from Vac packed where as the light malts would have a higher moisture content and thus need to breath a bit, to not go moldy.

[Eoin]

Any way grain should be allowed to breath!
Unless its vacuum packed.

Surely that is a contradiction.
Air in a vacuum is going to be minimal.

If the grains are crushed as in the OP and the title then chances are they are, like the parrot, to paraphrase "it's not pinin', it's passed on". At this point with all the exposed starches you want as close to vacuum as possible to stop deterioration.

[mr hoppy]

I store in a spare fermenter with lots of silica gel / moisture absorbent sachets in it. Seems to work reasonably well. Mind, it's probably a good idea to use crushed base grains as quickly as possible - as you use more of them and they seem to stale faster than darker speciality malts.