“Hops are the salt on the potato,” says Ron Silberstein. “You know, you can add salt to your potato, but you don't eat salt alone.”
Silberstein sits in the center of The Rake in Alameda, a bar that’s attached to the malthouse he started with Dave McLean and Curtis Davenport two-and-a-half years ago. He’s quoting his former professor at UC Davis, Dr. Michael Lewis, who, more than 20 years ago, imparted upon him the importance of beer’s most overlooked ingredient: malt.
These days, Silberstein divides his long working hours between that malting business, Admiral Maltings, and his organic San Francisco brewery, ThirstyBear. It’s a feat few could undertake, but Silberstein has an uncommonly deep energy reserve. He speaks fervently and at length about carbon sequestration, organic growing, and no-till agriculture in the craft malting process as if it were saving his life to do so.
It might actually be saving our lives, to an extent. Craft malting, in so far as it utilizes grains from local farms that don’t travel long distances to the malthouse, is more ecologically friendly. But Admiral Maltings is going steps beyond that baseline, seeking to make as much of the process as green as possible.
So far, that’s added up to good business. Already, Admiral’s capacity is perpetually maxed out, and its malts are sold to breweries all over California. They’re doing something right, even if they’re not 100% certain what that is. There’s a blueprint for craft breweries, but not so much for craft maltsters.
“It feels like the craft malt movement is kind of following a similar template as craft beer did in its early days, and it's just a number of years, decades behind it,” McLean says.
As in those days, Admiral’s founders think the promise of a more holistically fresh and locally produced beer, and the resulting pay-off in flavor, will catch on with consumers. As McLean points out, “You can’t have truly local beer if you don't start with local ingredients.”
Beer is an agricultural product. That concept suggests proximity, but in reality, few breweries obtain their ingredients from local sources. Yeast may be proprietary, but hops are brought in from Yakima, or even from as far off as South Africa, or New Zealand. Water is from a nearby source, though it might be treated, and malts usually come from a mass producer thousands of miles away.
That’s a blow to the foundational truth of “local” beer. And it’s a missed opportunity for brewers to support their area farmers.
“People can reclaim a regionality or at least offer that as an option, even if every single beer you make isn't like that,” Silberstein says. “[They can] support their local economy, to reinvigorate the farmer. And it's not just the farmer, it's the person who stores the grain, cleans the grain, their farm equipment and their families and their schools and on and on and on.”
Admiral tries to address those concerns with its small-batch operation. When it opened in 2017, it was the first modern-age craft malthouse in California, and one of just a handful in the United States. Over the years, particularly since WWII, malting gradually became a macro company’s game—not unlike brewing—and the industry’s leading players still serve most craft breweries in the United States. Companies like Idaho’s Busch Agricultural Resources, North Carolina’s Cargill Malt, and Minnesota’s Rahr Malting Co. dominate the market today.
Rahr, for example, which in 2016 built the world’s largest single-site malting facility, produces about 400,000 tons of malts per year. For the sake of comparison, the Craft Maltsters Guild’s “craft” label is given to malthouses that make no more than 11,000 tons of malt annually. Admiral Maltings, one of a growing number of craft maltsters, is on track to produce just 1,100 tons this year. It hopes to get that number up to 1,500 by next year, but it’s no easy effort; the craft malting process is more involved and intentional than it is at the macro level.
“It blew me away that all of the local breweries whose beer I enjoyed drinking fit into that local food scene, but not with any tie to the local agriculture.”
It starts with the farms themselves. Most farmers Admiral works with are in the Sacramento Valley or near Tulelake at the northern edge of California. In Sacramento, where it’s drier, Admiral requests partners utilize practices like organic cultivation or no-till farming, which sequesters carbon and is exceptionally sustainable. In Tulelake, a more wetland ecosystem, it asks farmers to produce certified organic barley “to provide habitat and food for migratory birds,” Davenport says.
Such asks are, however, a luxury, and Admiral can’t always check all the green practice boxes. But it’s working towards that goal.
“A major reason we opened Admiral was to create a new market for sustainably grown grains in California, which provides farmers with a new crop option to add in their rotation that requires few inputs (water, fertilizer, pesticides) compared to most California-grown crops,” Davenport says.
Admiral’s malting process, like that of other craft maltsters, takes a little over a week. The first two days are spent steeping the barley, three separate times, in water that’s gone through a reverse-osmosis filtration system. When the barley is hydrated, it’s spread in a single layer across a malting floor, a few inches deep, atop a radiant cooling system. Over the next five days, maltsters will rake the barley as the kernels break down and germinate, making sure each kernel is turned and can breathe. Because the grain naturally heats up during the process, the cooling system helps to regulate temperatures.
“If you didn’t do the germination step, the whole inside of the kernel doesn’t mill very well,” Davenport, the maltster, says on a tour of the malthouse. “All the starch molecules have big durable cell walls that don’t allow yeast to get to the sugar. That’s what allows it to be mashed and fermented.”
When the barley is ready to be kilned—when it has begun to sprout and the roots have grown equal in length to the grain—it’s conveyed into an imposing white box with a perforated floor. Inside, the barley will be dried from the heat pushed inside from underneath—like in an oven—and then kilned and toasted into one of Admiral’s 12 malt types. From there, the malt is cleaned and sorted into 55-pound bags before being picked up or shipped off to California’s craft breweries.
If it were up to Admiral’s founders, they’d have brewers get the malts into mashes as soon as possible. As with newly roasted coffee beans, freshness counts—and this freshness is one major benefit of sourcing local malts as opposed to those that are mass-produced. It also makes for a major upgrade as far as taste is concerned.
“[It’s] kind of like fresh bread versus stale bread,” Davenport says. “Kinda tastes the same, but [with fresh] there are different levels of flavor.”
There’s another important ethical gain, for breweries and the industry at large: reducing the distance an agricultural ingredient, like barley, needs to travel between farming, milling, malting and brewing. CDP, an environmental disclosure platform, found earlier this year that a “company’s supply chain contains on average 5.5 times as many greenhouse gas emissions as its own operations,” as Forbes reported. Minimizing that ecological impact industry-wide could be feasible as such craft malthouses proliferate.
In an industry aiming to champion ethics in production, craft malting is ready to embrace its moment. In California, it starts with Admiral Maltings.
In 1994, five years after Ron Silberstein passed the California bar exam, the young San Francisco immigration attorney was attempting something that had never been done before: to secure American asylum for a gay Mexican man, an AIDS activist, on the basis of persecution. It was quite a surprise, particularly to Silberstein, when the strategy worked.
Despite the major win, he just didn’t take to legal work. Not long after, he quit to start a brewery.
Silberstein had begun homebrewing in 1978—the year it became legal—while he was an undergrad in Massachusetts. After a formative stint in Spain, he moved to San Francisco for law school, where, in his limited free time, he sharpened his brewing abilities.
“I went to Sacramento and did the American Brewers Guild course and it was great. Dr. [Michael] Lewis was like, ‘What is this attorney doing sitting in the front row of my class?’ We connected because I was an unusual student and I was serious—I took it deadly serious.”
He took low-level gigs at Marin Brewing Company and the San Francisco Brewing Company, where he was “getting paid like $6 an hour,” Silberstein recalls.
“At the time I was planning on opening a brewpub in Spain,” says. “There’d been this guy who [wanted to] open one in Barcelona. My brother was living in Spain, I was married to a Spanish woman at the time, and I wanted to be a pioneer in Spain. Boy, I'm kind of glad I didn't do it.”
By 1996, Silberstein was able to open the certified-organic ThirstyBear Brewing Company, which he named for a newspaper headline he saw years earlier in the San Francisco Chronicle: “Thirsty bear bites man for cold beer.” The pub, which serves Spanish food, opened with beers named after the Russian man, Koslov, who was bitten by that titular, parched bear.
“I hope that it fundamentally changes the way we look at the soul of beer. Malt is the soul of beer.”
A year later, in 1997, 27-year-old Dave McLean founded Magnolia Brewing Company in the Upper Haight neighborhood. McLean had come to San Francisco in the early ’90s by way of the Northeast, in search of psychedelic rock and craft beer. But soon after, the homebrewer was on to something bigger. He became set on opening his own brewery, with a focus on his favored cask and English-style beers.
“I caught this bug,” he told Good Beer Hunting last year. “This is what I want to be doing.”
He attended UC Davis’ storied Master Brewers program, also under Dr. Lewis, a “giant in the field” who taught McLean about the complexities of malt.
“He introduced the whole science of brewing to me with a really strong malt background,” McLean says. “The first few weeks of the program, that was even kind of annoying at the time. We talked about barley physiology and the agronomics of barley, and spent a lot of time on the biology of the kernel and plants. At the time I was like, ‘Come on, let's get to the beer-making part.’ But in hindsight, that was really a pivotal thing. That set a tone for me of beer with malt being the foundation of it all and hops being a seasoning, really—just a flavor.”
With a petite, seven-barrel system, Magnolia—named for the building’s Summer of Love-era owner, burlesque dancer Magnolia Thunderpussy—garnered frequent customers, particularly at a time when there were few Bay Area breweries.
Around 2009, McLean took a risk on a new brewhouse and restaurant, Smokestack at Magnolia Brewing in the Dogpatch, an up-and-coming San Francisco neighborhood. It was a promising idea, but things took a turn. The buildout hit delay after delay and took years to complete. To boot, the neighborhood didn’t become a nightlife hotspot, as restaurateurs in the area had predicted, so in 2015, Magnolia filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Two years later, McLean reluctantly sold the business to New Belgium Brewing Company and Oud Beersel.
The notion of building some kind of malting facility had already sparked in McLean’s head, well before Smokestack opened. Silberstein’s too. The two, veterans of the San Francisco brewing industry, had probably the most outspoken interest in craft malts in the area, and had together imagined the possibility of making a truly, holistically local beer. In 2010, they returned to their brewing roots, and drove to Davis to meet Dr. Lewis.
“He had worked in a malting facility,” Silberstein says. “And he told me that in California there was a whole history of growing multi-quality barley. They used to grow the six-row variety called Atlas, right up until WWII when all of a sudden, because of the interruption in trade, and the German subs knocking out things crossing the Atlantic, they weren't getting our barley anymore.”
Maybe, they thought, with Lewis’ guidance, they could help revive California’s stalled malt production.
In 2011, Curtis Davenport found himself in a bit of a quandary. The organic farmer, working in Carpinteria on the Central Coast, was facing drought years and seeking a use for 40 acres of desiccated, unirrigated land.
The solution was grains. But to make it work from a financial standpoint, he’d need to facilitate the sale directly to bakers and brewers. To him, that presented an exciting opportunity.
“At that point, being in the farm-to-table, farmers market scene, it blew me away that all of the local breweries whose beer I enjoyed drinking fit into that local food scene, but not with any tie to the local agriculture,” Davenport recalls thinking.
Sales weren’t that easy, it turned out—there were no craft maltsters in California. To sell barley to a brewery, he’d need to involve a maltster thousands of miles away. It wasn’t sustainable.
So he joined the Craft Maltsters Guild—at the time just a Google+ group—and set out to build his own mobile malting facility. He borrowed equipment from Lance Jergensen from Reno’s Rebel Malting Co., brought it to Santa Barbara, and installed it all inside a shipping container.
“I was able to malt the barley that I had grown and sell to a few breweries,” he says. “Initially, I thought [I could] move it around from farm to farm … it did not pay for itself, unfortunately.”
The insulated set-up consisted of a small, stainless-steel germination floor, with glycol tubing underneath and a kiln in the back. Altogether, it cost a substantial $20,000 and allowed him to malt up to 500 pounds of grain at once. While not a minuscule amount, it wasn’t a massive haul, either.
Davenport first met Silberstein around that time at UC Davis’ Barley Field Day, an annual event organized by Lynn Gallagher (who would later serve as the namesake for Admiral Maltings’ Gallagher’s Best malts). But it wasn’t until the subsequent Craft Brewers Conference that the two had a substantial conversation. It was an awkward one.
“I was calling myself the California Malting Company, and [Silberstein] had registered [an] LLC as California Craft Maltings,” Davenport says. “I was like, ‘We had a nice time at the Field Day.’ Then I [said], ‘Hey, by the way, I think our names are too similar. Can you change yours?’”
By 2014, however, that competitive spirit had faded, and Silberstein knew he wanted Davenport to be involved in his malting project.
“[Silberstein] was asking about me growing barley for him,” Davenport recalls. “[I said] I really want to open a malthouse—why don't we just do it together?”
Getting McLean on board was substantially tougher. Though he and Silberstein talked about a prospective malting house “all the time,” McLean, unbeknownst to Silberstein, couldn’t commit time or capital to the project due to Magnolia’s troubles.
“I was just hoping somehow he could [get] involved,” Silberstein says. “At some point ... I called [McLean] up thinking that he was in a position to come in. What I didn't realize is he was going through all this trouble, just before he ended up going through bankruptcy and having to sell the business. Looking back, I don't even know how he kept his level of calm and presence [while] he was going through hell.”
Plans were, nevertheless, moving forward—in part with the support of an industry icon.
“I had planned on opening my own little malthouse years ago,” says Sierra Nevada Brewing’s founder Ken Grossman. “I went to Europe and started drawing it and [was] starting to design one a long, long time ago.”
But other financial obligations took precedent for Grossman, and the Chico company ultimately decided to prioritize building a second brewery. So when he got word Silberstein was pursuing a malthouse, Grossman says, he jumped at the chance to be an investor.
“I heard about it early on,” Grossman recalls. “At one point, I was like I need to track [Silberstein] down.”
There’s a corner of Alameda Island that was once a naval air station. It’s been inactive for more than 20 years, but the massive, vacant warehouses there are, these days, pretty appealing for artisan makers requiring the kind of large space they wouldn’t be able to find in San Francisco. Namely, it attracts alcohol producers, like St. George Spirits, Hangar One, and Faction Brewing.
So when real estate became available in “Spirits Alley,” Silberstein got the paperwork and funding in order.
“This building … was twice as big as we wanted and needed a ton of work,” Davenport says, but the pros outweighed the cons. It was in good structural shape, so they decided to make it work by bringing on a partner business, Almanac Beer Co., to take over the other half of the building.
McLean had, up until this point, attended as many meetings with Davenport and Silberstein as possible.
“I was trying to make it work as a parallel thing,” he says. “It fit exactly the brand and vision that I tried to create for [Magnolia]. It was always about local sourcing and knowing where everything comes from. But the catch-22 of being a brewer who opens up a brewery in the cradle of the local-sourcing movement is ... there weren't any suppliers in our area actually making locally grown agricultural products for beer. That was the bothersome puzzle that I couldn't solve for 20 years.”
After Magnolia sold, McLean suddenly had more time on his hands. He got more involved with Admiral, and in particular, with its new supplemental, public-facing project: The Rake.
“You can’t have truly local beer if you don’t start with local ingredients.”
Once it was finally open, business ramped up quickly. Six months in, Admiral had malted around 125 tons of barley from Northern California. The general public, however, wasn’t yet grasping the impact craft malt can have on a beer. So the founders arrived at a plan: open a bar on site at Admiral, where the only beers poured would be made with their malts.
McLean and Silberstein were well-versed in what it took to run a bar, but variations in the two business models—with Admiral as a supplier, and The Rake as a bar—presented their own challenges.
“The models are totally different,” McLean says. “We're navigating being kind of a hybrid—we're certainly a business-to-business concept because we're selling to commercial breweries and distilleries. But [with The Rake], we're trying to simultaneously create enthusiasm and understanding of malting for the general public.”
There are around two dozen beers on tap today at The Rake. Each one made its way back to Admiral—its provenance, in a way—from another city in California. This year, the selection will likely feature the 11 Admiral-malted beers that medaled at the 2019 Great American Beer Festival.
The space is not like ThirstyBear or Magnolia. It’s modern, industrial, with exposed wooden beams and accents that pay homage to its days as a naval structure: dark metals; WWII-era TIME Magazine clippings on the bathroom wall; a container on the bar, reading “No tips sink ships.” On one side, several booths are affixed to the wall under windows looking into the malthouse. On the other side of the glass, a maltster in a jumpsuit rakes germinating barley across the floor.
I follow Davenport around the building, to the back entrance into the malthouse. Even from feet away, the smell of warm honey on fresh bread is already emanating through the cracks in the closed doorway. The space inside is sprawling—it’s a wonder that, even at this square footage, Admiral is maxed out on its capacity.
Most of the room inside is occupied by Admiral’s floor malting space. There’s a steeping tank near one door, and a large boxed white kiln near the back. In another room, malts are being cleaned off and sorted by a buzzing machine.
As Davenport walks me through Admiral’s malting process, he opens up colossal bags of raw rye, barley and oats. They arrived recently from local farms championing eco-conscious growing practices, like no-till farming—a practice SiIberstein says is increasingly necessary.
“[With no-till farming], you need less input, you need less fertilizer, you need less pesticide,” Silberstein says. “It's really difficult to do certified organic when you do no-till, but you're preserving the microbiome, your carbon sequestering, all that soil and everything. And it is a more sustainable [process].”
The practices are reflected in the beers themselves. They are more substantial, bready, with a fresh-baked flavor at the fore. The difference is staggering, particularly in the Lagers, where malts are given a rightful platform.
Admiral’s careful process has since attracted some major fans, like Discretion Brewing. The Santa Cruz brewery is particularly aligned with Admiral’s organic and sustainable principles.
Dustin Vereker, like many, heard about Admiral Maltings by way of a full-page spread in the San Francisco Chronicle. But he and the company became loyal customers because of Admiral’s environmental focus.
“It’s not just an ad slogan for them,” the co-founder says. “We can wholeheartedly agree that they stand by that philosophy. They are sourcing sustainably grown barley.”
It certainly helps, though, that the malts the brewery sources, for beers like its popular Shimmer Pils, are very fresh and often far more flavorful than those that are mass-produced.
“We’re getting a honey in their malt, a nice fresh grassiness,” Vereker says. “They tend to be a little bit biscuity, crackery, with these sweeter, floral, grassy undertones. [The aromatics] are beyond compare … I think [craft malts] will help American craft brewers innovate and push the boundaries of what beer is.”
Ed Gobbo, brewmaster at San Francisco’s Harmonic Brewing, knows the feeling. The first time he bought from Admiral, he purchased a Vienna malt called Feldblume.
“The second we stepped in the brewery, before we walked in the door, the whole brewery had this amazing bakery smell to it,” he remembers. “It was due to the freshness of the malt.”
Gobbo jokes that he should be on Admiral’s payroll by now, given how often he finds himself discussing their malts.
“It’s become a real part of our beer and persona as a brewery,” he continues. “We’re a local brewery using malts made two miles away from us. Most of what we use their malt for is malt-forward beer; we started a Lager program primarily because we have access to their malts.”
The premium cost of craft malts can be an issue for some, Gobbo says, but he thinks the price is worth it for the quality. Particularly as the industry returns to brewing more classic Lagers, and other styles where unvarnished malt shines, he believes, “breweries will start hopping on the bandwagon.”
Currently, more breweries hopping on that bandwagon could present an issue for Admiral. It needs more space.
Like other craft malthouses springing up across the country, there’s a market for the product, but that kind of success has led Admiral down an untrodden path. It’s run out of real estate, and is overwhelmed with orders—not just from breweries, but distilleries, too. So it’s working on a solution: an ambitious build-out for a third malting floor.
“It didn't really matter that [Silberstein and I] both started breweries,” McLean says. “[As ’90s-era brewers], we had a good 10 years of other pioneers coming before us that sort of paved the way, that gave us a lot of templates to look at. I’ve been describing this as what I assume it might have felt like to open a brewery in the ’80s, when there weren't many people to turn to for questions. It felt a lot more like uncharted territory and trying to invent something.”
The timing, however, has turned out to be just right; the “drink local” aphorism still reigns, though the meaning is, in actuality, not as accurate as brewers—and the public—once thought. Silberstein hopes he can be part of that change. And he hopes craft maltsters like Admiral are the catalyst for the revolution.
“I hope [craft malts] reinvigorate community in a sustainable way and bring back the ability to offer regional beers,” he says. “But I also hope that it fundamentally changes the way we look at the soul of beer. Malt is the soul of beer.”
Words, Alyssa Pereira Photos, Clara Rice Language
