The latest beers from breweries like Faction, Cellarmaker, and Black Sands have a certain something in common, and it’s not the same experimental hop variety or a new strain of yeast. For the first time, they’ve all been brewing with local, Bay Area malt — the dried, germinated barley which forms the basis for beer.
Admiral Maltings is now up and running in a former dry goods facility at the Alameda Naval Air base, making craft malt a new possibility for Bay Area brewers. “For the most part, malt still follows the old model, back when there was just Budweiser, Miller, and Coors,” explains Ron Silberstein, the longtime head brewer at ThirstyBear who formed Admiral Maltings with Magnolia Brewpub founder Dave McLean and investment from Sierra Nevada founder Ken Grossman.
Yes, that’s right. The vast majority of craft brewers still get their malt from the same major suppliers that provide for big breweries. And if it seems like an oversight that one of beer’s four key ingredients — hops, yeast, water, and malt — is mostly homogenous and mass-produced far from the small breweries that use it, that’s because it is. But a new fleet of craft maltsters including Admiral — the North American Craft Maltsters Guild counts about 300 members — has plans to change that, challenging large malt houses to do for malt what’s already been done for beer generally.
The local results, or beer made with Admiral Maltings’ floor malted “Maiden Voyage" grains, are almost ready to taste. Cellarmaker brewed its first batch of beer with Admiral’s grains last weekend, and brewer Joe Buppert is eager to share the final product with visitors to the taproom.
“We’re super excited that we’ve got [Admiral] across the bay,” says Buppert. “It’s a lost art, floor malting. It’s super labor intensive.”
His approach is a pale ale, brewed with mosaic hops. “We’ll dry hop it and taste it along the way, seeing what the malt is giving to us,” says Buppert, who suggests that the floor-malted grains might be richer and deeper in character than is typical.
Black Sands, meanwhile, is brewing one of its SMASH IPA series beers with Admiral’s malt. For those beers, head brewer Cole Emde selects a single malt variety and a single hop variety for each beer, giving them room to shine on their own.
For all the breweries receiving Admiral’s malt — Alamanac, Faction, Thirsty Beer, Magnolia, Marin Brewing Co. — it’s a chance to cast malt in a starring role, giving it a sliver of the spotlight that’s mostly enjoyed by hops.
Why malt is the real king of beer
“Why is it that everyone knows all about this resinous flower cone that adds a little bitterness and aroma to beer?” Silberstein asks jokingly, referring to hops. Beer varieties, he points out, can be brewed without hops, or spontaneously without yeast thanks to wild, naturally occurring bacteria.
But “No malt, no beer. Period.” That’s why malt is to beer what grapes are to wine, the brewer argues.
Malt, to break it down, is just barley that’s been tricked. Maltsters convince a seed into thinking it’s about to grow a plant, then take all the enzymes, all the food it’s making, and freeze it in place. The brewer then mashes it into water, boils that grainy stew with hops, and adds yeast that will eat its sugars, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide.
California was once fertile ground for the production of malt, explains Charles Bamforth, the Anheuser-Busch Endowed Professor of Malting and Brewing Sciences at UC Davis. Once upon a time, malting barley produced in the Golden State was exported as far as Great Britain, where it served nicely in malty English ales.
“They said that good malting barley should have a little bit of sun on its back, and it did in California,” says Bamforth.
But as other California crops proved more profitable and large breweries came to dominate the beer market, barley farming and malt houses consolidated in Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, and Canada. Mega malt houses formed in the shadow of mega breweries, and their emphasis became the consistency upon which those large breweries could depend. Operations like Coors, for instance, contract farmers to grow specific malting barley varieties that work best for their beer.
In that way and others, big barley is a sort of proxy industry to big beer. The largest malthouses in the United States, Cargill Malt in North Dakota, Rahr Malting Co. in Minnesota, and Busch Agricultural Resources in Idaho, each produce about 400,000 tons of malt a year. That represents more than 45 percent of the total amount of malt produced in the US.
“If you have the largest malting facility in North America, you’re blending barley from multiple farms, and you’re not going to experiment,” Silberstein argues. “But we can innovate with malt just like brewers innovate with beer. We’re nimble and small enough to experiment.”
The craft malt revolution, if it’s to occur at all, will need to start on the farm. “The challenge is always going to be how much local barley is available,” says professor Bamforth. UC Davis has a breeding program for malting barley and is constantly creating new varieties. But those will always be competing for real estate with rice and corn, Bamforth explains.
Like Coors, Admiral Maltings is showing farmers which barley varieties to grow, and has to convince local farmers to get onboard. Silberstein’s pitch: “This is a crop that farmers can rotate, that can grow on non-irrigated land, and from us, it fetches a lot of money... California’s rainfall is perfectly suited to barley. You plant it in November to December, it rains until March, and you’re harvesting it in June.”
What is floor malting?
Silberstein learned the malting process formally at the Canadian Malting Barley Technical center, where he met Curtis Davenport, Admiral Malting’s head maltster. Their floor malting process, an older and more difficult process than the alternative pneumatic malting process, involves germinating barley on a radiant cooled floor.
After about 10 tons of barley are soaked in 3,000 gallons of water several times — “waking up the grains,” as Silberstein puts it — the barley is drained and strewn across the malthouse floor. As the malt germinates, heat dissipates through the floor and by aerating the grains by turning them over with a rake every eight hours.
After four days, the malt is placed in a kiln, a huge, false-bottomed oven that heats it to 200 degrees to remove most of its moisture, freezing the growth of the grain. The results are 8 tons of malt.
Admiral could produce at most 1,440 tons of malt per year. That’s not much, but it’s a start.
“Admiral Maltings is one small step in the right direction,” says professor Bamforth, “but there’s still a long way to go. They’re only going to be supplying, in the first instance at least, a reasonably niche market.”
Malt is for everyone
Another market, and Admiral Malting’s biggest customer to date, is craft distilling, an industry that’s perhaps poised for a boom of its own. St. George Spirits, Admiral Maltings’ Alameda neighbor, will distill whisky with the company’s craft malt. Meanwhile, Almanac Beer Co. is building a brewery literally under the same roof as Admiral, and plans to get its malt right from the source.
In the coming months, Admiral hopes to install its own taproom, with as many as 20 taps of beer made with its malt and windows facing into the malting facility itself.
“One thing that makes beer exciting is a little knowledge,” says Silberstein. “The more people develop a lexicon, the more the product becomes interesting to them.”
That’s where maltsters have their work cut out for them. “The hop people have done a phenomenal job of marketing... and one of the first distinguishing characteristics in the craft brewing movement was just the addition of more hops.”
The next chapter in craft beer hasn’t been written, but it could be about malt. “We think that by educating the consumer about malt-forward beers, or malt in beers, they’ll have more fun, and they’ll want to experience that as they learn about it.”
That’s something beer drinkers can raise a glass to, starting with these Admiral Maltings beers, available in the coming weeks.
- English Blonde Ale, Magnolia Brewpub, 1398 Haight Street
- Strong Golden Ale, ThirstyBear Brewing Company, 661 Howard Street
- SMASH IPA, Black Sands Brewery, 701 Haight Street
- Pale Ale, Cellarmaker Brewing Company, 1150 Howard Street