The Cereal Crops Research Unit evaluates the malting quality of over 4000 breeders' selections each year. Until about 5 years ago, we selected lines having ever higher enzyme activities by undermodifying our malts and selecting the lines that performed best under these conditions. Now however, the brewing industry has decided that the amylolitic activities of most present cultivars have reached a sufficiently high level and that they do not want them increased further. For this reason, we now need to prepare malts that are well modified and that reflect the malting quality that these lines will have when processed commercially. We have changed the steeping and germination steps of our malting process and determined the malt modification levels by monitoring the amylolitic and -glucan values of the malts produced. Barley samples were procured from commercial maltsters, together with malts that they had prepared from those same barley lots. We malted this barley and compared the quality analyses of our micromalts with those prepared by industry. By altering the steeping and germination parameters of our micromalting system, we have been able to produce malts that are very similar to the industrial product. We have incorporated these alterations into our standard procedures, enabling us to provide malting information to breeders that allows them to better gauge whether their new lines will be accepted by industry.