What’s malted barley?

An important raw ingredient in alcoholic beverages such as beer and scotch, it is alarming how often people (well, mainly those that I have encountered) do not understand what exactly is malted barley.

The malting process consists of two parts - germination, followed by heat treatment to stop the germination. The first part is best described as creating the right environment to encourage the barley seed to start growing. While it starts to sprout its roots, internally it also begins to convert its stored energy from starch to sugar, as food for the new plant.

Now, basically the goal is to get that conversion of all that starch into sugar, after which the process is stopped with heat. This completes what is known as malted barley, which offers the optimum yield of fermentable sugars.

To continue the story a little further, alcohol is then collected as a result (by-product actually) of the yeast consuming the sugar (in a process known as fermentation, which is the basic process behind the preparation of alcoholic beverages).

Hope this explanation, though somewhat simplistic, helps to clear the picture.