Were it not for the presence of Crisp Malt, the village of Great Ryburgh in Norfolk, England, would look like any other in the county. But among the red-brick cottages, fish-and-chip shops, and historical round-tower chapel sit towering malt silos. These monolithic, rust-orange and chrome vessels jut out of the horizon, and look like they’d be more at home on the set of “Blade Runner” than plonked among this typically idyllic stretch of British countryside.
The reality is, however, that it makes perfect sense for Crisp to have its home here. Norfolk, which makes up part of East Anglia alongside England’s eastern seaboard, not only experiences some of the lowest rainfall in the U.K., but is also extremely flat, and the soil is nutrient-rich. This makes it perfect for the production of wheat and, more significantly, barley, on an industrial scale.
One of the most celebrated barley varieties, Maris Otter, was developed here at the Plant Breeding Institute in Trumpington, Cambridge (located on Maris Lane, from which the variety took its name) ahead of its commercial release in 1966. No other commercial barley variety has been in production as long as it has. Although brewers’ barley—and indeed Maris Otter—is a viable crop in many parts of the U.K., including Cornwall and Scotland, East Anglia is its spiritual home.
Along with other British malt houses, such as Muntons and Simpsons, Crisp is regarded as producing some of the best brewing and distilling malt in the world. It’s as popular with small British brewers, such as Burning Sky Brewery in Sussex and Duration Brewing (which itself is just 18 miles from Great Ryburgh), as it is with giants like Suntory in Japan. You’ll regularly find its products in the U.S., too, where it’s imported by BSG CraftBrewing, part of the Minneapolis-based Rahr Corporation. Established in 1870, Crisp now produces 260,000 tons of malt per year (around 115,000 tons of which is made at its Great Ryburgh site), around 16% of malt produced in the United Kingdom.
Not content to sit on their hands, however, Crisp has recently invested millions of pounds into new packaging and processing equipment, with the idea that better malt means better beer. “We would like to think that our innovation provides our customers with an extended palette of colors and flavors,” Dr. David Griggs, technical director at Crisp, tells me. “This in turn gives them the tools to enhance their own product offering to the consumer.”
Crisp is no stranger to innovations in malting technology, having previously installed state-of-the-art steeping, germination, and kilning tanks that can process 200-ton batches at a time. In 2018 it invested £6.7 million ($8.7m) in new developments at its Great Ryburgh site. Among them was a cutting-edge, automated milling, cleaning, and packing line, an innovation geared towards supplying the U.K.’s 2,500-ish craft brewers—particularly those without their own milling equipment—with the freshest malt possible.
The other portion of this investment is even more fascinating, despite the fact that Griggs plays it down by referring to it candidly as “thermal processing equipment.” £3.2 million ($4.1m) of this spend went to a French manufacturer known as Revtech Process Systems. The firm was commissioned to produce a heat-treatment system designed for the roasting and kilning of grains such as barley, wheat, rye, and oats.
“We wanted to take a new technological approach to the production of traditional malt products and use this opportunity to produce a new range of products that would be problematic using drum roasting technology,” Griggs says. “This [new technology] will allow us to produce malt with greater consistency of color, potential to provide more specific color versions of traditional colored malt products, and give us lots of new product development potential.”
The speciality malt plant (a name which, for me at least, somewhat underplays its significance) sits unassumingly in a tin-shed warehouse at the center of Crisp’s Great Ryburgh facility. Upon entering its wide-brimmed doors, this otherwise innocuous building ceases to be nonchalant. At the rear of the facility, twin spirals of metal tubing rise out of the floor some 30 feet high, resembling the kind of creation that Nikola Tesla might have developed. Each coil is a single piece of tubing, delivered from France as a complete assembly. Impressively, the device only took three weeks to install.
It’s also set into about 40 cubic meters of poured concrete foundations. When I ask why, the plant's lead technician—the appropriately named Hannah Beer—turns it on for me. Without warning, the columns start vibrating aggressively, causing what feels to me like a highly localized earthquake. Beer assures me there’s nothing to worry about, talking over the noise of the plant as she explains how each grain works its way from the bottom of the first tube to the top, before being sent down to the base of the second coil and going through the process once more.
“With a traditional drum-roasting process there’s no guarantee that each grain is being roasted equally,” Beer says. “With the specialty malt plant each grain is treated identically, which gives us greater consistency from a single production run and means we can dial in specific colors [of malt.]”
“With a traditional drum-roasting process there’s no guarantee that each grain is being roasted equally. With the specialty malt plant each grain is treated identically, which gives us greater consistency from a single production run and means we can dial in specific colors [of malt].”
Dr. Griggs explains how drum roasting—the kind that’s used in small-scale coffee production as well as in malted barley—can give off undesirable “burnt notes.” The nature of the specialty malt plant means that it can work with more delicate grains, such as rye or oats. This also includes Maris Otter, which has a fragile husk, making it more difficult to roast using conventional means.
When Beer produces some of the grains she’s been processing using the machine, its results are immediately evident, with the color from the roasting process applied evenly and equally across each grain. I’m told this would in turn apply to the flavor the malt produces, meaning that, potentially, brewers could custom-order specific roasts—or even flavors—using this technology. The plant is able to process 1.5 tons of grain per hour, but can quite easily handle a small batch of just half a ton.
It’s a supremely innovative application of a machine that’s more commonly used for purposes such as the pasteurization of seeds and spices. And, as Griggs tells me gleefully, “It makes malt that tastes better.”
At Mecca Grade Estate Maltings in Madras, Oregon, founder Seth Klann has recently installed an 80-foot-long-by-20-foot-wide, all-enclosed, stainless-steel machine built around a series of four flexible mesh conveyor belts. He calls it a “uni-malter” and claims—with its batch size of 12 tons—it’s the largest of its kind in the U.S.
“The best way to visualize our machine is to think of M.C. Escher’s ‘Never-ending Staircase,’” Klann tells me. In 2010, he had just returned home to his family farm after graduating with a BFA in Graphic Design from Oregon State University, when he got into all-grain homebrewing. In his own words, Klann gets “a little obsessive” about things, and was soon attempting to malt the wheat his family was growing on the farm. With information about small-batch malting thin on the ground, he began using plastic buckets and aquarium pumps for steeping. He germinated the grains in shallow pans in his garage, before kilning them in a converted, formerly upright freezer.
“I soon was making better malt from my janky setup than what I could buy from the local homebrew supply store,” he says. “When you have to figure everything out by yourself, you tend to get pretty practical about what can and can’t work.”
He’s since applied this same train of thought to his commercial maltings, which is essentially a traditional floor maltings (wherein the grain is germinated by, quite literally, being spread out on a floor). Instead of manually turning the grain every six to 12 hours, Klann once again set to work designing and building an automated system. Once this problem was solved, he then designed automated conveyors to move the grain, and, eventually, a moving steeping and kilning process.
“I soon was making better malt from my janky setup than what I could buy from the local homebrew supply store. When you have to figure everything out by yourself, you tend to get pretty practical about what can and can’t work.”
“We were told by other established maltsters that the design was going to be a failure, but we stuck with it and here we are today, making some of the most unique malt in the world,” he says.
Mecca Grade offers just one of several examples of technological innovation in small-batch American malting. Another can be found right off I-25 outside Loveland, Colorado, where husband-and-wife duo Todd and Emily Olander have established Root Shoot Malting. In 2015, Todd, a fifth-generation farmer, traveled to Bamberg, Germany, where he visited Weyermann, one of the largest manufacturers of malted barley in the world. The trip also included a stop at renowned brewing equipment manufacturer Kaspar Schulz, which recently designed state-of-the-art systems for the Carlsberg/Brooklyn-owned E.C. Dahls Bryggeri in Norway and London Fields Brewery in the U.K.
Having used German-manufactured farming equipment since the 1990s, Olander looked there again when he decided to buy a malting plant. He commissioned a self-contained, 10-ton drum-malting system designed and manufactured by Kaspar Schulz, becoming the first U.S. producer of malt to do so. A separate steeping vessel can support up to three 10-ton germination-kiln combo drums. These allow complete control over temperature, airflow, and humidity, and can precisely manage the environment inside each drum. Root Shoot currently operates two of them; the second was installed at the start of 2019.
“The Olander family has been farming in Northern Colorado since 1926, and grew barley for Coors for almost 40 years,” Emily Olander tells me. “Small, craft brewers and distillers had limited options to purchase grains from a family farm and small malthouse, so we wanted to close that gap. High-quality, local, fresh malt was just what our industry needed.”
According to Olander, what sets their maltings apart is that they’re a working farm, so they’re able to grow their own grains, including barley and rye, among others. Test plots allow them to trial new barley varieties and alternative grains ahead of other producers. That ends up being a huge advantage in a market that already includes over 60 small-batch maltsters, many of which are represented through the Craft Maltsters Guild.
“We produce a malt that is completely unique to us. It gives brewers a sense of place and that terroir is shown right through to the end product,” she continues. “We haven't yet scratched the surface on what malts this equipment can produce.”
“Terroir” is a word that crops up increasingly in small-batch malt production. Mecca Grade founder Seth Klann also leans on the term when describing his product. His, too, is a working farm that produces 100% of its own grain. Though Klann admits that this choice limits production volumes, he “wouldn’t have it any other way.”
What quickly becomes evident when speaking to both Klann and Olander is their desire to create high-quality, flavor-focused products that give brewers the best raw materials possible with which to make beer. The other common thread, which also rings true with the investments at Crisp in the U.K., is that this development in technology is necessary to reach the demanding levels of consistency that modern brewers require.
“Our entire process and the resulting machinery was designed to break apart any concept stratification and to ensure that every single kernel of grain was the same product,” Klann says. “If you can achieve this, you end up with an intensely flavorful malt.”
In Great Ryburgh, Crisp still produces some of its product the hard, old-fashioned way: traditional, hand-turned, floor malting. The work is painfully labor-intensive, but must be, in some way, gratifying; some of the employees who work in the old “No. 19” floor maltings—which have stood on site since the 1870s—have done so for more than two decades.
As romantic as floor malting is, there’s also something of a vanity to it: it takes longer and is more expensive to produce, and is far less consistent than the modern systems that Crisp makes the majority of its output with. Just 1.5% of its production in Norfolk is from the floor maltings, but it has allowed Crisp to indulge in some particularly interesting projects.
Take, for example, the recently released Obadiah Poundage, a traditional London Porter brewed in collaboration between beer historian Ron Pattinson and brewers Mike Siegel at Goose Island Beer Company in Chicago and Derek Prentice at Wimbledon Brewery in London. In 2015, Crisp “resurrected” an out-of-production malt variety known as Chevallier, which was introduced as far back as 1820. By employing traditional floor malting and kilning techniques, Crisp were able to produce an accurate representation of the brown malt that would have been used to make these styles of beer at the time.
“We produce a malt that is completely unique to us. It gives brewers a sense of place and that terroir is shown right through to the end product. We haven’t yet scratched the surface on what malts this equipment can produce.”
When you add this historical connection to the modern technology of the speciality malt plant, things get really exciting for Crisp’s technical director Dr. David Griggs. When I ask why they’d invest such a large amount of money into this project, he exclaims, “Why not!?”
“Looking to our heritage, whilst also embracing new manufacturing technology, allows us to innovate and provide our customers with exciting new product development,” he says. “Any takers for crystal floor-malted Chevallier or Maris Otter?”
At Root Shoot Maltings in Colorado, however, it’s not the technology that’s the most exciting aspect of malting for co-founder Emily Olander. For her and husband Todd, their equipment is a means to an end: an efficient method of expressing their own regional terroir, and the unique characteristics they believe the barley varieties they use possess.
“Yes, the malting equipment is pretty impressive, but what we can create from it is even more attractive,” Olander says.
“We see the consumer gaining more exposure to the [agricultural] process, having an understanding of the ingredients in craft beer, and appreciating the importance of local farms,” she continues. “There's a connectivity movement happening in craft beer, and it's exciting to engage with the beer drinkers and our local communities. We're excited for malt to take a front-row seat.”
Words by Matthew CurtisIllustrations by Ben Chalapek
