Lecture ‘Hold my beer – malting barley germination energy testing in 3 hours instead of 5 days‘
Lecturer: Jens Varnskühler, CEO and co-founder seedalive GmbH
Tuesday, September 24, 10:00-10:45
Language: English
Click here for the presentation.
The history of barley conservation through brewing is around 6.000 years old and was invented by accident. Interestingly the first beers only contained barley and water, hops came later. Nowadays brewing is a really scientific process, with loads of protocols for quality control.
One very important step in QC of malting barley seeds is the evaluation of the “germination energy” as an indicator of the speed of germination of a malting barley lot. Just like in quality assesment of seeds for sawing (ISTA or AOSA rules), there are standardized protocols developed by different organizations to measure the germination energy of malting grains.
For malting barley EBC and MEBAK for example suggest the “Aubry Method”, where representative samples of grains are germinated at 20°C in the dark with specific amounts of water and counted on day 3 and 5.
The seed viability rapid test seedalive now is also available for the quality measurement of malting barley. Aside of being much faster seedalive predicts not only the germination speed for all 5 days, but also the water susceptibility of each batch, another very important trait for the malting process.
The described method is easily automatable with standard laboratory robots.
Join the early adopter club for the fast, simple, and sound QC of malting grains!
Cheers!
Speaker: Jens Varnskühler