It all started with a conversation with a customer, as many of our interesting projects do - can you create Peat Malt from this bog we found? We love ideas like this and field quite a few. These are the types of ideas that keep our team invigorated as they allow us to get creative with a new process, dive into some detail on a COA, or work with something we haven’t tried before.
The peat came from the only publicly minable peat bog in the state and is essentially sopping wet dirt. This isn’t the beautiful grassy squares of peat moss that comes from Scotland, this is its own thing with its own challenges. The first challenge is drying it out so we can actually burn it to add peat smoke to the malt.
Peat ready to be burned!
Again, our team was up for the challenge. We covered a section of our floor with the stuff and grabbed a heat exchanger from one of our machines, piped it in, and brought over a giant fan to blow the heat over the bed of peat. Using a shovel and rake to turn it (almost like floor malting!) we dried it down to the point where it would burn! But, where do we burn it and how can we control the smoke?
Rocket Ship smoke generator
This challenge was one of the more interesting ones for our engineering folks. We’ve actually designed 3 unique methods and now use an interesting combination of them to make our various peated and smoked products.
Method 1 - the meat smoker. Hooking up a big smoke generator to our machines (similar to one used to smoke meat), we could pump peat smoke in during the malting process.
Method 2 - the rocket ship. Using a fermenter as the chamber for smoking, along with some grain handling equipment, we can smoke 2,000lbs of malt over 2 days.
Method 3 - Spinal Tap. Using an 11 sided (“it’s one more!”) custom-built and designed peat burner, we are creating higher quality smoke compared to our previous methods. We are getting increasingly intense flavors into the malt!
Custom designed and built 11-sided peat smoke generator
Through this process, we’ve been able to create 3 unique expressions of the local peat. We have Peated Malt, Peat Smoked Malt, and Re-Peat Malt.
Northwest Peated Malt is our most traditional method of applying peat smoke to grain - the smoke is injected during the germination step and continues through the kilning process to help dry the malt out. Customers must commit to a full batch as this creates 16,000lbs of Peated Malt.
Peat Smoked is our small batch (1,000lbs - 2,000lbs), allows for unique combinations of grains and smoke types. This method is more of a traditional smoking, where smoke is combined with malted grains to give them a more intense smoke flavor.
Re-Peat combines these two processes, malt is smoked during germination and kilning and again post malting to give the most intense peat flavor and aroma our facility can muster. This is our most time and labor intensive process as we do a full batch of Peated and 8 batches of Peat Smoked. Lead times are often a month or more.
Our customers have been ecstatic with the results so far. After years of waiting, our first batches of Peat Smoked and Northwest Peated malts have been released in recent whiskeys from our customers, Peated malt continues to be a point of pride for our team and is a shining example of their ability to take on unique challenges and create intriguing results. Our customers willingness to provide feedback and insight along the way truly helps us refine our processes. This dialogue and camaraderie with our partners is what makes our business and our products unique.