Early Generation Screening for Malting Quality

Abstract

Early selection of the most promising crosses and concentration of resources on them is a highly efficient and cost effective strategy in barley breeding. Such selection has been successfully applied, for yield and other agronomic characters, at the Scottish Crop Research Institute, but requirements of both time and seed quantity necessary for laboratory scale malting have precluded such an approach for malting quality. Many rapid procedures to assess quality have been postulated, but no single test has been found to predict accurately the hot water extract obtained following malting and mashing.

A project was initiated to study early generation screening for malting quality. Experiments within this project have indicated that malting may be successfully carried out on 10g samples and malts screened either by a ‘scaled down’ hot water extract determination or by comparamill assessment of milling energy. These techniques should greatly increase throughput and enable laboratory scale malting to be applied as a screening technique at earlier generations of breeding programmes than is possible at present.