Small Craft Maltsters have exploded onto the craft beer and distilling scene over the past few years. With this growth has come new flavor opportunities and products. If you’re still on the fence about Craft Malt, this post is for you. Here are 5 reasons why should you buy from a Craft Maltster compared to a larger malting company.
Personal Attention
Most Craft Maltsters have reps based in their markets. By focusing on having great people in place, you can pick up the phone, shoot a quick text or email, and hear back right away. At Skagit, that also means we get out and do visits in market regularly. We love showing up for brew days and helping out, talking shop, or just meeting up for a pint. This collaboration and personal attention is core to the industry and core to Craft Maltsters in general.
Personal attention extends to our malts as well. With most of our inventory shipping out from our main facility in Burlington, we have an eye on it and regularly test it to verify quality. If something isn’t right, we move it out of the facility to a farmer for animal feed. These are all part of the benefits of being small as well.
Supporting Small, Local Business
Most Craft Maltsters are small, it’s one of the ways we distinguish ourselves from a commoditized system of barley production. By committing to being a small company, we’re able to keep that personal attention on our customers and products while knowing exactly where they are grown (in fact we drive past them on the way to work!). Not only does our grain stay local, but the money spent on it stays in the local economy. We pay our growers a premium and it is a driving factor on why we exist - to keep farming in the Skagit Valley viable.
Being small helps us stay nimble.
Custom Opportunities
Our size and scalability allows customers of all sizes to get a truly custom designed product. With a pilot malting machine capable of producing 350lbs batches and a single batch in our big machines producing 15,000lbs, you can get your malt created your way! We’ve done custom projects outside the brewing and distilling industries into culinary and research markets. Craft Maltsters want to work with you to create something special that fits your individual needs and vision, let’s collaborate!
Transparent Local Impact
Some Craft Maltsters grow and process the grains through the entire process. At Skagit, our customers are always a handshake away from a grower. We have long-term relationships and investments in our local farms and they love working with us! Keeping our grains local and our malting facility efficient means our carbon footprint is much smaller than shipping from overseas. We also have Organic and Salmon Safe products which further create positive impacts on our region.
Our malthouse is always open for tours and our growers love having folks check out their fields. Give us a call and we’ll set up an awesome tour experience to see what a flourishing local grain economy looks like!
Flavor
One of the biggest reasons to work with a Craft Maltster is the richness of flavors that craft malt can provide. While commodity malt needs to hit certain specs and get blended for homogeneity, craft malt can take advantage of smaller scale processes that actually impart more flavor. Smaller batch sizes allow us to play around and develop new malts that couldn’t be created on a scale that bigger companies need to produce at. Access to these flavors and styles are a huge benefit to starting a relationship with a Craft Maltster.