Tax season was a bear this year so I didn't get to work on any projects, but nearing the end of it, I had been researching more and more about malting my own sorghum.  I had actually started researching a few years ago, but really ramped it up in the past month and finally made the attempt.

I won't go into the failure of the first attempt, but I will say that 48 hours into the process I knew something was wrong and had to start over.

What followed was a multistep process first steeping the grain, germinating the grain and then drying the grain following updated processes modified to what I could possibly do.

Step 1:  Sorting the grain.

After receiving the grain, I picked out approximate 2 pounds of sorghum and tried to pick out broken and odd looking grains.  I expect that a series of graded sifters would work better for this, but it's not likely something that I will have handy.  Broken grain, stones, twigs,  bugs.  These would not malt and could be quite detrimental to the process.  Thankfully, because the sorghum purchased from Pleasant Hill Grain was triple cleaned, all I had to deal with was the occasional broken grain.



Step 2:  Steeping the grain

Once I measured out my 900g's of sorghum, I did an initial wash, using the same metal bowl, filling it with water and running my fingers vigorously through the grain to clear any husks and floating non-viable seeds.  I scheduled out a soak/air dry schedule of 6 hours soak in 30 degrees C water, 3 hours air dry for 45 hours, plus a final higher temperature soak at 40 degrees for 6 more hours.
I soaked using a .1% alkaline solution.  Ideally, I would have been using sodium hydroxide (NaOH).  What I had to use instead was sodium carbonate(Na2CO3), derived from sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO3) by heating baking soda in the oven at 300 degrees for about 20 minutes.  I think I could have found the right time vs temperature formula for that though.  A 1% solution is 1g/100g water (and 1g water = 1ml water), so what I used was 1g/1L of water.  I used 4 liters of water per soak period.
In a comparison between a non-alkaline soak vs a alkaline soak, the alkaline soak showed the brownish result, either a reaction from the soda, or something being drawn from the grain.
*Note, ideally, after the final 40 degree C steep, I would have sterilized the grain with a 1% solution for a few minutes.

After the soak, the small chits (sprouts) are starting to grow.  (Image taken from a viability test.)

Step 3: Germinating the grain

I used my oven as a germinator, sterilizing it first by running the clean cycle a day before.  I spread the grain on a screen and used a plant heater to keep the oven at 40C, an ultrasonic fogger to keep 90-100% humidity and an air pump to keep new air circulating into the oven to prevent stagnation.  Germinating grain does use up oxygen, and it's been studied that the soak water also has oxygen taken from it, though aerating the soak water showed that grain sprouts too soon for malting.

Unseen in the photo was that I moved the airstone and heat pad under the bottom rack, moved the grain to the bottom rack and put a bowl and fogger above it.

Despite the high humidity, higher than what is used for other grains, sorghum quickly loses water, so its necessary to spray the sorghum once or twice daily, as well as to rotate and stir the grain to keep it from matting.

Germination day 4

Germination day two.