Sightglass: How Craft Malting is Transforming Beer
Source: Skagit Valley Malting
The Sightglass project is a collaboration between Beervana and Reuben's Brews. Together, we select a topic of mutual interest and I write about it. In some cases, Adam Robbings and Matt Lutton will interview one of the central players for their podcast, also called Sightglass. Articles in this series include "How a Hop Earns its Name," "The Future of Yeast," and "How Women Enrich Beer."
If you spend much time talking to brewers in the UK, Germany, or Czechia about their malts, you’ll hear something no American—until recently—ever considered: the barley variety. For traditional brewers in those countries, the barley variety and the way it was malted were critical factors in building the flavor and texture profile of their beers. For decades, Americans referred to barley solely by generic category, “two-row,” and most didn’t pay much attention to how it was malted. If they wanted to build flavor and texture, they did it with specialty grains. Base malts were merely the “sugar” in the formulation (a word brewers routinely used).
Fortunately, things are finally starting to change thanks to the several dozen craft maltsters scattered across 31 states. They are producing malts with character from barley varieties bred for taste rather than fermentability. Many of the barley varieties maltsters currently use were bred or selected to grow in climates as diverse as the hot, dry desert of Eastern Oregon or the humid valleys of North Carolina. The largest of these small outfits is located in a lush misty valley in Northwest Washington and may serve as a model for creating a sustainable small-scale product integrated into local agriculture. Skagit Valley Malting uses enough barley to help local farmers produce crops outside the commodity chain, and their wide range of barley varieties offer breweries not just unique flavor profiles, but a touch of terroir as well.
I recently visited the malthouse for a tour and witnessed yet another way in which American beer can become more interesting, more tasty, and more distinctive.
Dave Green. Source: Skagit Valley Malting
Malt in the kilning stage.
Know Your Barley
Much of what Americans understand about barley and brewing malt comes from decades of very particular development. Following Prohibition, everything in the brewing world became highly streamlined for maximum efficiency. As the market matured, especially by the 1980s and ‘90s, almost all beer production was reduced to a single type of beer, which allowed the further streamlining of ingredient production and specs. Brewers wanted hops with extremely high alpha acid content (so they could use fewer of them) and neutral-tasting barley that was highly fermentable.
“In the case of commodity malt,” Skagit Valley Malting CEO Dave Green explained, “they’re primarily producing malted grains for big beer and their needs are that the ingredients are always the same. They’re trying to get the exact same results out. So consequently they select barley varieties that are all very similar, so they perform the same in the malthouse.”
The process has become so entrenched in producing a single kind of malt that an organization called the American Malt Barley Association (AMBA) actually has specifications to produce only that kind of malt. “They’re looking for things that are very similar.”
In a fascinating twist, the places Americans grow barley—very hot, often dry climates—have been figured in to AMBA’s thinking. The types of barleys they approve receive their gold star precisely because they grow well in these climates. “In the Midwest [crop diversity] is far more limited—corn, soybeans, wheat. You commonly think, ‘well, that’s the best place to grow wheat.’ The answer to that is, ‘No, that’s backward logic.’ The reason they grow those three crops is because those are the only three crops that get a reasonable return to the grower and are commercially successful.”
For Green and the folks at Skagit Valley, that presented an opportunity. The green valleys of Northwest Washington are far more fertile than the fields east of the Cascades, allowing farmers in the Skagit Valley to grow eighty different crops. The cool nights allow the barley to grow slower, and that increases yield substantially and also causes the grain to grow differently. Proteins are lower, which means many varieties that don’t grow well in, say, Spokane County next to the Idaho border, grow very well in the Skagit Valley. Erik Youngren, VP of Sales and Marketing, joined us on the tour and offered this example:
“Fritz, for example, was developed by WSU, but it didn’t pass AMBA certification and become one of their certified barley varietals. When we took it and grew it here, it did great. One of the reasons it didn’t do well is because they grew it on the East Side and it didn’t have the yield from drought stress. Over here it did fine and has been a good producer for our farmers. It’s one of the barleys we use that’s outside of their certification.”
Dave jumped in and elaborated. “It comes down to heat units and moisture. We have these cool nights, so it moderates the grain and allows it to grow slower. We have lots of light. That same variety will have fundamentally different characteristics.”
Getting out of that stream of what Dave calls commodity barleys changes everything. For growers in the lush Skagit Valley, it means being able to produce a far wider range of barley varieties. And for breweries, that means more flavor diversity. The old commodity system was literally unable to creat unusual, distinctive grain because it wasn’t commercially viable at a small scale of demand—that is, the amounts craft breweries use. The seam in the market created the opportunity for small malthouses to fill a void and it will transform the way beer tastes in America. It’s so common for American-made German-style pilsners to taste the same because they’re obliged to use the same few imported malt varieties. Now, instead of using Weyermann, brewers can turn to craft malthouses.
Source: Skagit Valley Malting
The Biggest Little Malthouse
Of course, barley variety isn’t the only factor in the way malt tastes. Before it arrives at the brewery, barley goes through three or four stages of preparation—steeping, germinating, kilning, and (in some cases) roasting. Those all happen within a malthouse, and the design and process varies substantially facility to facility. At one end are traditional floor maltings, which haven’t changed much in hundreds of years, or much more modern plants where the process is highly focused on producing the same kind of malt for bulk purchase. Floor maltings are prized because they produce flavorful, often rustic base malts full of character. Large facilities have the virtue of consistency and efficient delivery.
Skagit Valley developed technology that splits the difference. Starting with a small prototype that can malt 400 pounds, they devised a system that does all three steps in one drum-shaped vessel (excluding roasting). Once they confirmed it worked, they built a much larger version capable of malting 20,000 pounds of barley at once. In the years since selling their first grain sack in 2014, they have added seven of these, and each one acts independently of the others, giving them great flexibility. (They even designed one to malt solely gluten-free grains.) Other companies have systems that can do two of the three steps in one, but as far as Dave Green knows, Skagit Valiey’s are the only vessels that can do the entire process.
The vessels are cylindrical and rotate over the course of the three steps. Inside are six smaller and one larger central screened channels through which the system blows air, either cool or heated depending on the stage. Skagit Valley begins the process by pumping raw barley or wheat into a vessel and ten days later, on average, they remove kilned malt, ready to use. As we watched one machine very slowly turn while kilning germinated barley, Dave described the process.
Steeping. Once the grain goes it, it is rinsed and rotated. Each variety requires a different approach to steeping, but roughly speaking, the next step is soaking. The idea is to coat the seed rather than submerge it. As the vessel slowly turns, it mixes the grain and water, lifting the grain out of the water for part of the time before submerging it again. “Water can only go in one end [of the seed],” he explained. “It has to migrate uniformly all the way through that whole kernel. As soon as water hits a portion of that, it begins germination. If that happens rapidly, then it will germ and be dead at the same time. You’ll have a low extract level in that grain.” When it’s stored, barley has a moisture level of 12%. After steeping it rises to 45% for uniform germination. This entire process happens at cool temperatures to retard germination—much as what happens in the field.
Germination. Once the grains have absorbed water uniformly, maltsters blow warm air through the channels in the vessels. The seed will wake up and root, converting its starches so they can nourish the plant as it grows. In conventional system, a malster rakes the grain to keep the little roots from tangling up. At Skagit Valley, the channels inside the vessel act as baffles, doing the work through the slow rotation. This process “exposes every kernel to the exact same environmental conditions,” Dave explained. It results in very consistent germination. This process takes four days.
Kilning. After germination, maltsters dry out the grain and raise the temperature, kilning the to suit the particular type of malt they’re making (pale, Vienna, etc.). This takes three days on average. “The way you apply heat has everything to do with the final malt style,” he explained. “Kilning is going to draw flavors out. It’s going to develop color based on the temperature—it’s a Maillard reaction, the same as cooking. Low and slow for a pot roast, wildly different flavor than hot and fast for grilled steak. If you think about that temperature relationship, that’s what you’re going to utilize. So we can build a kilning/drying heat profile over time to tailor that to the needs of that final malt.” They can malt anything up to 120 Lovibond—which is fairly dark but short of roasting—in their drums.
Skagit Valley Malting’s rows of drum malters
Airflow channels inside the drum malters.
The finished product
Awakening to Malt’s Potential
Skagit Valley has its own small brewery onsite to test out batches made with their malt. On the day I visited, we sampled identical pilsners made with different base malts. Two were remarkably distinctive. Wintmalt, a barley grown by Goschie Farms in Oregon, had a slightly reddish hue and was crisp and dry. Francin, a Czech barley, was sweet and very creamy. After a moment I noticed some bready notes underneath. The third variety I didn’t much like at all. It was husky and tannic. The beers tasted very little like one another and barely seemed like the same kind of beer. For Americans used to ignoring malts, such a lineup offers a real awakening to the potential of malt.
As we were talking, Dave mentioned that the world has a store of at least 30,000 different varieties of barley. Some are just a few kernels in seed banks and others are old heirloom varieties that fell out of favor for good reasons. Many have been bred recently to grow well in different climates or because they have excellent flavor. (New breeds are especially important on a warming planet.) Dave is excited to try as many as he can.
“Sometimes they come out of Europe. Honestly, sometimes we get an envelope in the mail with a dozen seeds. It can be that small. We have a research facility here that we have access to and we work with a lot, so they can do testing. It’s a matter of hunting all over the place. We look at what’s being done on the commodity side and do steer away from those because generally they can offer that at a lower price. Now that the doors are open and you’ve got eighty or a hundred different craft malthouses, people are poking in all different directions. It’s very exciting now.”
Aerial shot. Source: Skagit Valley Malting
Getting out of the commodity chain has other benefits to farmers as well. Peas used to be really big in Skagit Velley. It was an important crop partly because Americans used to eat a lot more peas, and partly because it was a great rotational crop. “Green peas were a nitrogen-fixing legume that’s really great for the soil, it’s relatively easy to grow, and there’s a ready market,” Dave said. Eventually, though, that market diminished and production moved east.
Grain was an obvious choice to replace peas as a rotation crop, but farmers ran into the problem of industrial farming. That streamlining created a system in which it didn’t make sense to use grain there. “The challenge was that there was no infrastructure for any of these grains. They were selling to a commodity feed system. There aren’t a lot of cattle, so there isn’t a high demand. They can maybe cover their costs when their in that rotation cycle, but it’s certainly not profitable. If you look at the list of the highest value of the crops that are grown here, wheat and barley were always 79th and 80th.”
Tasting the fruits of their labor.
Skagit Valley Malting was an answer to the problem. They became an important local buyer the barley farmers needed for the crop to make financial sense. Moreover, the relationship ensures that the malthouse continues to have a local supply of barley expressing all the terroir of the Skagit Valley. It’s a mutually-beneficial relationship, and one that will give brewers a source of distinctive malt they can’t get anywhere else. This is, of course, an ancient dynamic. Travel around Bavaria and ask local breweries where they get their malt and only occasionally will you hear the same name twice. Malthouses all over the region provide the grist for the small breweries to give their lagers a house character. As American brewers get more familiar with the profound ways base malts affect their beer, the dozens of local malthouse all over the country will give their ales and lagers the same distinctiveness Bavaria’s breweries have.
This is an exciting time to be a beer drinker. Breweries have explored how yeasts and hops change their beer, but base malts remain a largely unexplored frontier. That’s partly because consumers haven’t encountered this variety and tasted its effects. I fell in love with that Francin malt Skagit makes, and they sent me home with a bag to experiment with. I expect I’m not the only one to be wowed by something entirely original. Look for malt and barley varieties to start appearing on a beer can near you—right next to words like “kviek” and “Citra.” When that happens, we’ll know malt has finally arrived.