2018 in Review

2018 was a pivotal year for Skagit Valley Malting, not only was it a banner year for sales but we also set forth ambitious long-term goals that will fuel future expansion.

We started the year off being nominated for our third James Beard Award under the category Outstanding Wine, Beer, or Spirits Professional. We made it to the semifinals and we couldn't be happier, its an honor to be recognized by a foundation that is dedicated to promoting food culture.  

SVM also participated in our first international competition, the RMI Analytics Heirloom malt and barley symposium, in Nuremberg, Germany. We brewed an awesome SMSH beer using only Obsidian malt and shipped it halfway across the world.  

Its no secret, we love to build our own machinery at SVM and 2018 was a big year for our operations team.

First, we built an automatic bagger that bags 2,000 pounds of malt in just seven minutes. This has greatly increased our production and allows us to get shipments out faster while also building inventory for future orders.

Next, we built three more silos this spring, greatly increasing our raw grain storage while also improving our ability to take in grain during harvest. We added two more 350-ton silos and added a receiving silo that will eventually be integrated into our grain cleaning. Furthermore, we poured the foundations for the next four 350-ton silos, two of which will go in before the 2019 harvest.

We also built two new Single Vessel Malting Machines bringing our total number of machines to five 9 ton vessels and one 400 pound pilot machine. SVM’s weekly malt capacity has increased to 45 tons a week! Roughly 1,300 hours of in-house fabrication and machining went into each machine and both machines have already started producing malt. We build these machines in pairs for efficiency and our operations team has already started on our 6th and 7th machine which will be installed in early 2019.  

The majority of the year was spent with three malting machines but we were still able to process 2.2 million pounds of grain and over 130 individual batches of barley and wheat.

Another exciting project for us was building our own malt smoker. SVM is now producing smoked and peated malt products so keep your eyes open for exciting products in 2019, such as Organic Beachwood Smoked Malt and local Peated Malt.

2019 will also feature the addition of Francin malt, a new variety of barley from the Czech Republic that we have grown locally and just begun malting.