A Computer Controlled Micromalter for Assessment of the Malting Potential of Barley Crossbreds

An automatic, computer-controlled micromalter with several advantages over current designs has been constructed. All operations are carried out in the one cabinet, and it is not necessary to intervene at any point during the malting process. The sample containers were constructed so that mechanical deculming of groups of ten large or fifteen small samples could be carried out in ten minutes. Initially, the capacity of the micro malter was 40 × 100 gm or 70 × 60 gm samples. These capacities were doubled by the use of longditudinal dividers slid into each canister, making the apparatus suitable for screening of samples submitted from the early generations of a breeding programme. The results obtained by malting 36 large and 60 small samples of the same variety; six replicates of six varieties; and subsamples of a bulk of a single variety in 37 subsequent runs all indicated that the instrument provided satisfactory separation and ranking between samples of differing malting qualities and grouped samples of similar malting qualities together.