Sorghum Malt Quality Data: The USDA Madison Screening

The complete dataset: 25 named sorghum cultivars, micro-malted at the USDA-ARS Cereal Crops Research Unit in Madison, Wisconsin, analyzed by standard barley malt methods at two germination lengths. Published here in full because this work has barely existed in North America — and researchers deserve the numbers, not a summary.

This dataset supports: Cultivars for Malting and K-State Results — the narrative pages that interpret it.

This page is deliberately a data page. If you want the narrative — which cultivars won, and how our flavor-first doctrine reads these numbers differently than an enzyme-first maltster would — that lives on Cultivars for Malting. This page is the record itself.

Methods, briefly

Twenty-five sorghum samples (60 g dry basis each) were malted on a Joe White micro-malting system at the USDA-ARS Cereal Crops Research Unit, using a schedule developed with Bard's input: a 26-hour steep (8h wet / 1h air / 8h wet / 1h air / 8h wet) at 24°C, germination at 24°C with spray-watering to 41% moisture, and kilning through five stages to an 85°C finish. Every cultivar was malted twice, one sample kilned after 72 hours of germination and one after 96 — which is why each appears twice below, 50 analytical rows from 25 cultivars. Analyses used the lab's standard barley malt methods, with enzyme extracts run at four times barley concentration to register sorghum's lower activity. Samples were not chitted at steep-out, at moisture in the mid-30% range (wet basis). The moisture matches the steep-out target on Steeping Sorghum; the chit state does not — that page steeps out at first chit showing, and this schedule did not reach it.

Modification target: 1:1 shoot-to-grain length with roughly 1-inch rootlets, reached by 72 hours. The 96-hour samples modified further but at malting losses the report judged too great to warrant — you can watch that trade-off happen in the numbers below (extract generally rises at 4 days; so do losses).

How to read this through our doctrine

The screening was scored the conventional way: diastatic power first. We malt for taste, not enzymes — and to solve the problems that decide whether a sorghum beer is drinkable, like wort turbidity and year-to-year crop variation. Read through that lens, wort clarity and color columns matter as much as the DP column, and a modest-DP cultivar with a clean wort can be the better brewing pick. Both readings are valid; they optimize for different processes. Ours assigns conversion to external enzymes and asks the malt to be good malt.

Explore this data

Sort, filter, compare samples side by side, and plot any two measures against each other. The full tables below remain the printable, citable record; this is the same data, interactive.

Interactive explorer50 analytical rowsexpand to view

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The dataset

Wort clarity is scored 1 (clear) to 3 (hazy); color is °SRM-scale lab color. All percentages dry basis.

3-day germination25 cultivarsexpand to view

Cultivar	Extract % (d.b.)	DP (ASBC)	α-amylase (DU)	FAN (ppm)	Malted protein % (d.b.)	S/T %	Wort clarity (1=clear)	Wort color
Pioneer 8282	47.3	45.7	63.1	76	9.2	19.4	1	1.87
Pioneer 82G63	50.4	30.4	67.6	86	8.7	21.8	1	1.92
Pioneer 83G66	51.7	34.5	68.0	78	9.0	19.5	1	2.07
Pioneer 8313	42.5	27.4	59.0	77	9.1	19.5	1	1.77
Pioneer 84G62	50.2	29.4	62.1	68	8.6	19.1	1	1.84
Pioneer 8500	48.6	31.4	50.5	71	11.7	14.2	2	2.14
Pioneer 8505	49.5	32.5	59.3	87	10.7	17.0	2	2.13
Pioneer 85G85	48.9	21.3	55.8	66	9.8	16.7	2	2.27
Pioneer 8699	42.3	33.4	52.6	75	11.6	14.7	1	1.99
Pioneer 86G71	43.3	35.6	56.4	73	12.2	13.8	1	2.16
Pioneer 87G57	38.7	25.4	62.4	108	12.4	15.7	2	2.34
Pioneer 8925	31.6	39.4	62.7	119	14.3	15.6	1	2.24
Pioneer 84Y00	55.6	34.4	65.9	84	8.9	20.1	1	2.08
Pioneer 85Y34	52.6	35.3	77.6	84	10.7	17.9	1	1.91
Jowar 1	54.5	27.3	57.9	90	10.6	17.2	1	1.95
Nct 7w92	57.5	19.2	48.0	85	11.2	15.1	2	2.48
Aggrow Eclipse	58.4	30.3	78.7	103	11.5	17.6	2	2.25
Orbit	58.1	32.3	86.2	106	12.2	16.8	2	2.31
Fontanelle W1000	57.7	28.3	62.5	93	11.5	15.8	2	2.42
Pioneer 84100	58.2	35.3	82.6	101	11.1	18.0	1	2.81
Dk44-41	56.6	29.3	79.6	102	12.0	17.0	1	2.17
NC 7W51	61.1	22.3	54.8	86	11.3	15.7	1	3.84
Producers 79	61.0	26.3	61.8	107	10.9	16.5	2	1.97
x 828	67.8	34.4	84.6	102	10.9	18.2	3	5.49
Fontanelle 5040c	61.7	33.3	80.0	109	11.5	18.0	1	2.37

4-day germination25 cultivarsexpand to view

Cultivar	Extract % (d.b.)	DP (ASBC)	α-amylase (DU)	FAN (ppm)	Malted protein % (d.b.)	S/T %	Wort clarity (1=clear)	Wort color
Pioneer 8282	60.2	30.6	90.2	79	9.3	18.5	1	2.38
Pioneer 82G63	56.0	34.5	109.4	99	9.0	21.3	1	2.11
Pioneer 83G66	50.2	31.5	80.4	78	8.5	19.4	1	2.40
Pioneer 8313	49.0	21.4	62.4	59	9.3	15.4	1	2.04
Pioneer 84G62	57.9	29.5	78.0	70	9.0	17.3	1	2.03
Pioneer 8500	56.6	30.0	62.6	83	11.9	14.6	1	2.29
Pioneer 8505	59.5	28.9	74.2	92	10.9	16.6	1	2.71
Pioneer 85G85	55.7	19.7	60.0	69	10.2	15.5	1	2.53
Pioneer 8699	52.4	32.0	83.7	94	11.5	16.1	1	2.69
Pioneer 86G71	44.7	24.8	59.7	64	12.3	13.7	1	2.61
Pioneer 87G57	46.3	27.8	80.4	100	12.4	16.2	1	2.72
Pioneer 8925	30.6	40.1	86.8	140	15.0	16.5	1	3.12
Pioneer 84Y00	55.8	30.9	75.5	70	9.3	18.8	1	2.46
Pioneer 85Y34	53.8	36.0	97.8	104	11.0	19.7	1	2.44
Jowar 1	63.7	33.1	93.2	107	11.4	17.5	2	2.27
Nct 7w92	56.5	22.7	63.8	100	11.6	16.8	3	3.67
Aggrow Eclipse	63.8	32.8	100.2	122	11.7	19.6	1	2.30
Orbit	64.7	34.9	100.1	127	11.5	20.4	1	1.93
Fontanelle W1000	62.3	29.9	95.1	121	11.4	18.2	3	3.56
Pioneer 84100	65.5	38.1	96.2	105	11.2	19.6	1	3.26
Dk44-41	65.9	32.9	96.7	134	11.4	19.7	2	2.91
NC 7W51	58.3	30.0	86.5	111	11.1	18.0	3	3.89
Producers 79	51.4	25.7	70.2	119	10.9	18.8	3	2.92
x 828	66.1	37.1	119.9	123	11.3	19.6	3	3.36
Fontanelle 5040c	59.7	31.7	96.3	124	11.4	20.1	1	2.76

Range summary

Measure	3-day range	4-day range
Extract % (d.b.)	31.6 – 67.8	30.6 – 66.1
Diastatic power (ASBC)	19.2 – 45.7	19.7 – 40.1
α-amylase (DU)	48.0 – 86.2	59.7 – 119.9
FAN (ppm)	66 – 119	59 – 140

For context: barley malt typically runs extract near 80%, DP near 100–140 ASBC, and FAN near 140–200 ppm — conventional published barley-malt ranges, cited here as industry context rather than measured in this dataset. Sorghum FAN at roughly half of barley's is exactly why yeast nutrition is a first-class concern in sorghum brewing, and why the DP numbers here support the external-enzyme doctrine rather than challenge it.

Cross-links in the published record

Two of these cultivars — Pioneer 82G63 and 83G66 — also appear in the Kansas State four-hybrid brewing study on K-State Results. Independent programs testing shared materials is how a young research field builds confidence; the alignment reading lives on Cultivars for Malting.

Download the dataset

→ Download the full dataset as CSV — all 50 rows (25 cultivars × 2 germination lengths) at full precision, including the moisture and soluble-protein columns the display tables above omit for readability.

Record

First published 2026-08-08 as v1.0. Corrections to date: none. This dataset is a frozen record — it changes only for corrections, and every correction is logged in this section with its date and what changed.

Where else this data lives: nowhere we can find. A records search (August 2026) found no copy of this dataset in USDA Ag Data Commons, PubAg, or the indexed USDA publication catalog — it appears to have remained a cooperative-program report rather than a formal data deposit or journal paper, which makes this page its only public home that we know of. If you know of a formal deposit or a published copy, tell us and we will link it.

Why the program ended — documented

The laboratory continued for years after this screening, but its later public output is malting-barley work, and the reason is on the record: in July 2019, the unit's research leadership confirmed to us in writing that its Congressionally directed mission covered malting barley — genetics, development, and malting-quality analyses for the nation's barley germplasm programs — and that without a new Congressionally authorized mandate, the unit could not direct resources to sorghum malting-quality research. The sorghum data on this page came from cooperative work inside that constraint. That is a large part of why the North American sorghum malting record is as thin as it is — a funding boundary, not a scientific conclusion — and it is exactly the kind of boundary a breeding or research program could still change.

Related published work

The closest published relatives of this dataset come from the Kansas State line of the same era:

• Veith, K.N. (2009). Evaluation of four sorghum hybrids through the development of gluten-free beer. M.S. thesis, Food Science Institute / Grain Science and Industry, Kansas State University. Major professor J.A. Gwirtz. hdl.handle.net/2097/2281.
• Evaluating Sorghum Formulations for a Gluten-Free Beer (2008). Conference abstract, USDA-ARS publication catalog.

Neither reproduces this dataset; both grew from the same soil. If your work builds on either, or on this data, we would genuinely like to hear about it.

How to cite this dataset

Budde, A. & Martens, C. Micro-malting and Analysis of Sorghum Varieties. USDA-ARS Cereal Crops Research Unit, Madison, WI. Dataset republished by Gluten Free Brewer, 2026. https://glutenfreebrewer.com/research/cultivar-data/usda-madison-screening

This dataset is published for reuse with attribution. Cite the USDA-ARS unit as the originating laboratory and this page as the published source; if your work builds on it, we would genuinely like to hear about it.

Permanently archived on Zenodo under CC BY 4.0, site-independent. Archived copy of this version: doi:10.5281/zenodo.21879915 · all versions (always resolves to the latest): doi:10.5281/zenodo.21879914. A logged correction publishes a new version; the all-versions DOI keeps pointing at the current one.

Use this data

This dataset is published for exactly one reason: almost nobody has done this work in North America, and whoever does it next shouldn't start from zero. If you're malting sorghum — commercially, academically, or in a garage — these numbers are a calibration point for your own. The report's own caveat travels with them: the same lines grown in other locations or under other nutrient regimes would likely score differently. If you generate comparable data, we want to see it — and the breeding program at the University of Nevada, Reno shows where this field is heading next.

Related Pages

• Cultivars for Malting
• K-State Results
• Malt Quality Lab Research and Results
• From Ivory 7 to Blue Milo #4
• Why Native Malt Enzymes Are Not Enough

Source and Validation Notesexpand to view

Data from the micro-malting and analysis program conducted at the USDA-ARS Cereal Crops Research Unit (Madison, Wisconsin) on samples and scheduling developed with Bard's input; values transcribed programmatically from the original analysis tables and rounded for display (extract, DP, alpha, protein, S/T to one decimal; FAN to whole ppm; color to two decimals). One cultivar name from Bard's later production history — Blue Milo #4 — is withheld elsewhere on this site under a seed agreement; all names on this page are as recorded in the original tables.