Scottish
researchers are working to rank spring malting barley varieties for their
resistance to grain skinning, a problem which is giving maltsters a headache, Farmers Weekly reports.
This coincided
with Steve Hoad, head of the crop science team at Scotland’s Rural College
(SRUC) kicking off work to look at possible varietal resistance and
environmental influences.
When the outer
layer of the barley grain, or husk, is lost this can cause big variations in
water uptake for maltsters and hence big problems in processing.
A wet harvest in
2012 with low levels of sunshine caused grain skinning problems with top
malting varieties Propino and Concerto affected across the UK.
Grain skinning is a significant problem for the malting industry |
“Most of the
modern spring malting barley varieties have some degree of risk to grain
skinning,” he tells Farmers Weekly.
His work is
looking to rank varieties for resistance and first results show Belgravia
appears to have better resistance than other popular varieties such as
Concerto, Odyssey, Moonshire and Propino.
He is waiting for
another set of results from harvest this year before drawing conclusions on
varietal resistance and the influences of environment factors.
Wet and dry
conditions at harvest may exacerbated the skinning problem, Dr Hoad adds.
His work is
looking to rank varieties for resistance and first results show that Belgravia
appears to show better resistance than other popular varieties such as
Concerto, Odyssey, Moonshire and Propino.
He is waiting for
another set of results from harvest this year before drawing conclusions on
varietal resistance and the influences of environment factors.
Wet and dry
conditions at harvest time may exacerbate the grain skinning problem, Dr Hoad
adds.
Concerto accounts
for about two-thirds of the annual 900,000t demand from Scottish maltsters for
distilling and brewing.
Read the article HERE.
The Global Miller
This blog is maintained by The Global Miller staff and is supported by the magazine GFMT
which is published by Perendale Publishers Limited.
For additional daily news from milling around the world: global-milling.com
No comments:
Post a Comment