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Using B.A.S. Barley for Enzyme Tea - Tutorial

Jeremy Silva | March 2, 2014

Barley For Enzyme Tea - Seed Sprout Tea

You can read about the benefits of SST or Sprouted Seed Tea in many places online and this powerful recipe is quickly gaining popularity. This Blog Post is about how to use BuildASoil Barley Seed to sprout for your SST solution.

We Now Carry Three Types of Barley:

1. Low Cost Feed Grade Natural Barley for Enzyme Tea

2. Medium Cost - Organic Certified Fully Cleaned Sprouting Barley

3. Gnarly Barley - A blend of seeds for seed tea, including Barley

Premium Tibetan Purple Barley was a previous product sold here.

What's the difference?

Our low cost feed grade natural barley is minimally processed and will contain small amounts of plant material and broken seeds. This barley is excellent for bulk sprouting for daily use in the garden, but this barley is NOT good for personal use and consumption. The reason is because the foreign plant material will cause bacteria and other things to grow very easily while sprouting. Regular rinsing will keep this to a minimum and is good for our plants but not 100% safe for our consumption.

The Medium Cost Certified Organic Barley is more expensive but will be totally cleaned and ready for human consumption, sprouting or anything you want and this Barley is Ideal for the smaller garden and will last a long time.

The Premium Tibetan Purple Barley was our highest grade product, organic and was the best on the market. We've however started supplying a blend instead that will more than exceed your expectations, the Gnarly Barley blend.

Super Sprouted Seed Tea Recipe

Version 2.0: (Credit to some old Coot)

56 Grams Barley Seed (2 Ounces)
Soak for 8 hours with Clean Water
Should now weigh minimum 84 Grams (If not soak longer)
Sprout seeds until tail is as long as the seed or about 1-2 days.
Blend in a food blender or whatever you have with a little but of water to help it blend.
Add this to 5 gallons water and you have one of the worlds most nutritious Plant Enzyme Teas available for PENNIES.

This tutorial will be for our low cost barley as there are a few tricks that will help make the process much easier. The Medium and Premium Barley are so clean that they are slightly easier to use.

Step #1: I like to soak the barley in water that has a little re-hydrated kelp in it.

Here is the seed soaking and you'll notice that many of the seeds will float.

Wait 8 hours and then tap the seeds so they sink... then scoop all the junk off the top. The goal here is to have as only seeds left to sprout and none of the plant material and seed hulls.

You can skim all that off or just pour it off into the sink and most of the seeds we want will stay in the bottom if done carefully. When you are done, they will look clean like this:

Then you can rinse them well to make sure they are ready to sprout, I just do this in a metal strainer.

Then you can sprout them in your typical fashion.

Most will use the Jar Method. I really like the Hemp Bag method or the Sprouting tray method.

Here is the same tray 24 hours later:

IMPORTANT: RISE THE SEEDS MORNING AND NIGHT AT LEAST.

And the Next Day:

You can see the seeds get all soapy looking while rinsing:

Here is the same tray after 3 days of rinsing morning and night... it only takes a few seconds

Now blend this up and add it to your 5 gallon bucket of water and pour into the soil :)

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10 comments

Alex on May 08 2014 at 01:11PM

how often I should water with corn and barley teas? Weekly? Also, I noticed that corn and barley are recommended for vegetive stage. What sprouted teas do you recommend for flowering?

@ ALEX:

I use barley or corn throughout all of the plants life but some people use alfalfa seed tea and barley seed tea in veg and use corn seed tea in flower it’s up to you.

Benni on May 05 2014 at 12:14PM

Hello,
is there a shelf life for the Barley/water food processor receipe ?

Many Thanks, Benni

@ BENNI:

Use this stuff right away it doesn’t have a shelf life at all.

how often I should water with corn and barley teas? Weekly? Also, I noticed that corn and barley are recommended for vegetive stage. What sprouted teas do you recommend for flowering?

Hello,
is there a shelf life for the Barley/water food processor receipe ?

Many Thanks, Benni

Regarding the application of Ful-Power. You can use the Ful-Power to help with sprouting seeds that you might be growing, but not on the barley sprouts. Don’t feed the Barley your expensive Ful-Power, instead feed the Ful-Power to your plants and let them benefit. So What you want to do is deliver the Ful-Power to your plants along with the already prepared Barley Enzyme Tea instead of giving it to the barley seeds to soak in. Make sense? A little confusing to type out….

Either way, the info below should help. This is one manufacturer that you can trust.

Application rates:

Seed activation: For vegetable seeds soak 72 hours at 25 ml/gal (1-150 dilution rate). For other, soak for 24 hours at 35ml/gal (1-100 dilution rate).

Cuttings and Bare root: 35ml/gal (1-100 dilution)

Hydroponic: 10-30ml/gal of nutrient solution

Soil and Container plants: 20-30 ml/gal (1-200 & 1-100 dilution)

Foliar Rates: 20 ml/gal (1-200 dilution)

I’m curious, how much Ful-Power is used?

I’ve been soaking my barley for 12 hours in 1 quart mason jars with 1/2 tsp of kelp puree and 1/4 tsp of Ful-Power, after an initial 10 hour soak in clean water. I only make about 2 gallons at a time.

I’m sort of winging it on the Ful-Power amount but rather not play guessing games.

RE: Seed Types

The primary reason that I originally used barley seeds was that there are serious books available on the subject for brewers who live and die by maximizing the enzyme levels in their malts. That is also true with distillers for products derived from barley like Scotch whiskey. Corn is used to make bourbon and so on but at the very core of the process are enzymes.

After I figured out the barley approach I began to use other seeds and legumes: pinto beans, navy beans, lima beans, soybeans, brown rices and even Bhutan red rice and it was my experience that the actual seed didn’t matter much at all. The effects were as dramatic with pinto beans as they are with barley.

There are 2 major exceptions: alfalfa seeds and corn. You can read a lot about the alfalfa compound (auxin) Triacontanol which is found in alfalfa meal. What gets lost in the discussion is that the sprouting alfalfa’s production of this auxin is at its maximum meaning that go gently into that good night if you choose to sprout alfalfa seeds. Start with 1/2 the amount you would with most other seeds.

The other big one is corn and this seed produces a wide range of Cytokinins on par with coconut water. With the international market demand for coconut water is pushing the price higher and higher and it’s only going to get worse. By using sprouted corn teas you will get the benefits from the Cytokinins without the expense. You don’t need to order organic corn seeds online or jump through hoops – just head over to your favorite supermarket and go to the popcorn section and buy an organic popcorn. Even Wallmart carries 3 or 4 brands of organic popcorn.

One thing about using corn is that I found it easier to puree these seeds once the tap roots grew out to 1" or so which softened the original corn seed.

I switch between alfalfa and corn seeds during the vegetative for the compounds I mentioned. Cytokinins will increase the girth and tinsel strength of the side branches and stronger branches will produce larger and heavier flowers.

And finally consider this: enzymes function as catalysts which are responsible for thousands of metabolic processes that sustain plant, animal and human life. True, pure Fulvic acid is described by Dr. Robert Faust (BioAg and NOT Bio-Ag) as a ‘catalysts of catalysts’ so what I do is add Fulvic acid to the ready-to-apply tea and feel that the increased benefits justify the cost which if you buy BioAg Ful-Power correctly you can save over 40% vs. the MSRP.

HTH

Clackamas Coot

Great Questions!

I’ve updated the blog post with the recipe which is COOTs recipe Version 2.0

The air bubbling was Version 1. Coot found that blending and using was much more effective as his research came from very well documented sources in the brewing industry. I’ll try to find his explanation posts later tonight.

That being said, if you don’t want to blend them for some reason you can do a soak for 48 hours after the seeds are ready. During this soak you want to avoid fermentation so that is why people introduce air bubbles. This isn’t needed in my opinion and I’m lazy so I don’t add air.

The type of seed really doesn’t matter and you could even choose seeds based on their properties. Some are using organic corn seeds to get more cytokinins and bushier plants… I’m currently using the BuildASoil 13 Seed Cover Crop mix as a srouting seed to do enzyme tea’s with. There are unlimited possibilites but I will tell you that barley seeds a large and have lot’s of enzymes and are affordable. They are also not often GMO etc.

Hope that helps!!!

Tl;dr

Coots version 1 was to soak the seeds for 48 hours after the seed tails popped with or without air bubbles
Coots Version 2.0 is the method used above and is much better.
If you don’t want all the chunks in the Enzyme tea, just strain it after blending.

*after the 12 hour soak the water is drained and seeds rinsed!

Apropos of Benni’s question, i’ve seen many people doing a 12 hour soak, followed by a 48hr aerated soak, then puree and add the slurry to 5 gallons of dechlorinated water. What are your thoughts on this method? Also, I’ve read that the choice of seed is less specific—do you know if wheat berries and alfalfa would work in the same way as barley?

Hello
Do you see any advantage of oxygenation somewhere during the time when the barley is soaking in water, by using a aquarium pump and a small hose submerged in the mix ?