What is Malting?

The goal of malting is to trick grains into sprouting and generating enzymatic activity, which will allow starches to become available for brewing and distilling processes. Using the 4 steps of malting - steeping, germination, kilning, and cleaning, different flavor components are created, allowing brewers and distillers to have a wide palette of flavors and colors to play with in their processes.

How We Malt

Our malting process goes beyond just making malt, we monitor and care for the grains the entire year to ensure they are as happy as possible once they go into our machines.

Harvest

We work with 7+ growers in the Skagit Valley and beyond. Our grower network starts the care of our grains from the first step - planting them in the right fields. By adjusting which field gets which grain, they’re able to adjust planting schedules and rotations to best suit each barley or wheat varietal they plant. Winter Barley needs to beat out both over watering from high flooding and getting eaten by migrating geese during the winter months, but by using precise mapping, they are able to hit massive yields for those barleys, which are very hard to do!

At harvest, we monitor the fields and wait until they hit the precise moisture percentage needed for harvest. Once they hit that, it’s a mad dash to get fields harvested and into our silos for storage until they are ready for malting.

Cleaning

We perform a quick cleaning before grains are put into storage and a slower, in depth cleaning before they are marked ‘malt ready.’ Once we remove all of the crap that you don’t want to find in your malt, it is ready to go into our machines and undergo malting!

Pre-Malting Storage

In a commodity malting system, where barley variety doesn't matter, larger silos and fewer of them work fine. We don’t do things that way. We know that variety of grain matters and built our storage system to preserve varietal separation. So, we have a bunch of smaller silos to make sure that each variety and crop year stays separate! These differences matter and we’ve built our entire system around that idea.

We designed our process around the needs of the grains,

not the other way around.

Steeping, Germination, Kilning, Cleaning

We’ve built everything from the ground up - that means our process is unique in the world of malting. We malt in a single vessel. This allows us to steep, germinate, kiln, and clean grains without transferring to new locations. Each transfer adds lag time in processes, adds to potential for damaged grains, and creates a layer of regimented needs for raw grains. By malting in a single vessel, we can dial in the right recipe for each new grain and have multiple different grains running through our system. If they need a longer steep or a different temperature for a step, we can adjust a single machine without throwing off our production schedule.

Post-Malting Storage

After malting is complete, we store our finished malt inside sealed liners in 2,000lb totes. These totes allow us to bag a pallet or fill a super sack quickly and easily. It also allows us to keep malt as fresh as possible and maintain batch separation. Each batch is sent out for analysis and our customers are able to access that data to pick and choose batches and varieties that fit their needs.

Our Facility

With a small batch Pilot Malting machine and 8 full-sized Production Malting machines, we’re able to support both our current contracted grain acres and have room for growth and special projects.

Pilot Malt system