AN AUTOMATED MICRO-MALTING UNIT FOR QUALITY ASSESSMENT IN A BARLEY BREEDING PROGRAMME

Open Access
Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
An automated micro-malting unit for quality evaluation of lines from a barley breeding programme, with the capacity to process 87 samples of 15 g grain or up to 129 samples of 5 g grain each weekly batch, is described. Aspects of the design of the equipment, in particular the malting chamber and sample containers, are discussed. The malting unit provided a relatively uniform environment within a batch when tested by malting replicates of one cultivar. There were very small gradients within the malting chamber during steeping and modification which resulted in small differences in the hot water extract of malts depending on container position. However, replicate samples within a batch gave mean extract values with good overall precision with a coefficient of variation of 0·6%. Furthermore, the equipment gave reproducible malting conditions from batch to batch. Hot water extract values of six barleys did not differ significantly between three successive malting batches and the major contribution to variance for all the malting characters measured in this case was attributed to differences between cultivars.

This publication has 5 references indexed in Scilit: