At the end of each year, we like to look back on all that happened, reflect, and put it together for our customers to see. This year was certainly one for the books!
This year saw the addition of 3 sales staff and 1 production staff, which allowed us to expand our customer base to 272 different breweries and distilleries! Our team is laying the groundwork to support the new production expansions that are coming in 2023, 2 new malting machines are expected to be online in Q1. With the increase in number of customers, we also saw a pile of award winning beers, exciting collaborations, and custom malt projects. Our customers are always coming up with creative ideas for custom batches and our expansion should allow more of these to happen.
Over the past 2 harvests, we’ve surveyed our growers and put together an in depth report detailing their growing practices and care of the land. This report will grow each year as we track the changes they are making and continue to be a leader in Regenerative Ag in craft malt. Part of this work also helped us earn Bronze at the international RMI Brewing Supply Awards, the only American company to win and the youngest by over 100 years.
Before harvest, we invited our customers to come up for a Barley Bonanza. This event was a great success with customers, investors and enthusiasts joining us for a cookout, malthouse, and field tour. We’re excited to grow this event in 2023 and get more people up to the valley to see our facility and meet our growers.
Our harvest itself was a mixed bag this year. Varieties that came in were superb, some of the best looking grain we’ve had since 2015. Sadly, Fritz was a loss, but we should be able to keep everything else churning along. We can’t wait to get Pilot back into our customers hands along with Oregon-grown Salmon Safe Francin.
With 2023 approaching quickly, we wanted to tease a few things we are looking forward to:
2 Additional machines coming online to increase capacity.
Gluten Free Certification Review
Deepening malting and breeding partnerships with Washington State University and Oregon State University as we get closer to scaling up varieties
A whole bunch of conferences and tradeshows - American Craft Spirits in Oregon, Craft Maltsters Guild in Maine, Craft Brewers Conference in Nashville, and additional local guild and association conferences.
Expanding and supporting additional regions as we build to support our full expansion plan, which would allow us to support more family farms in our region.
Thank you for your support over the past year and we look forward to supplying you with great craft malt in the new year!
