On Monday, we trekked up to Chilton, WI (pop ~3700) to visit the Briess Malt & Ingredients Co's original plant. Anyone who's ever ordered brewing malts from an online retailer has probably heard of Briess. They are the top producer of specialty malts for brewing, which means that homebrewers and craft brewers are highly indebted to their work. Their clients include Bell's, New Glarus, Goose Island, Sprecher, Left Hand, and Sand Creek. Plus, they offer products ranging from liquid malt extract to torrefied grains to malt powder. They also make a killer chocolate malt ball, and each of us was lucky enough to take home a bag at day's end.
There was plenty of logic to this field trip. We had spent the first three days of the course studying the malting process, and, as we quickly learned, maltsters know plenty about making great beer, and brewers ought to know more about how malt is made great. In fact, advances in malting in recent years have rendered obsolete centuries-old brewing practices that originated when brewers had to coax specific barley enzymes out of dormancy because maltsters hadn't done enough to prepare the malt for the brewhouse.
So what is malting exactly? Malting is the process of taking raw barley and getting it ready for brewing by cleaning it, steeping it, letting it germinate so that important sugars are accessible during a brewer's mash, and kilning or roasting it. Each of these phases requires specific space and equipment, and we were lucky to get an insider's tour of the malting facility as well as the packaging area.
A vertical design is common, if not ideal, for malthouses, and, Briess, founded as the Chilton Malting Co in 1876, follows this pattern. Barley is elevated to the top of a tall, columnar building and fed into the steeping tanks for the first phase of malting. We climbed several sets of creaking stairs to the top of the malthouse--easily the highest point in Chilton. I had to do a modified pull-up to see inside the tanks, which gave off a distinctive fish food aroma. We caught glimpses of the final aeration and draining process in one of the tanks and watched another go into "overflow," which is the process that removes undesirable contaminants and dirt from the barley.
In the germination room, we compared kernels that had been sitting for 24 hours to those that were just being emptied from the steeping tanks above. Typically, germination lasts 4 days, and by the end, forked rootlets are easy to see on each kernel. Large, ribboned augurs turn the malt twice daily so that the nascent rootlets don't get matted and tangled. Not surprisingly, we weren't able to go into the kiln or roasters, which reach temps of 450 degrees Celsius, but the roasters, as one might expect, looked like oversize coffee roasters--spinning rapidly to dry and darken specialty malts that add color and flavor to beer.
There was something surprisingly antiquated about Briess. Many of us were surprised by the fact that so much of the malthouse is made of wood. Briess even keeps around an old circular roaster that is ceramic and is heated by wood fire. Retro signs like "Practice good housekeeping: everything in its place" abound. "I'm surprised it hasn't burned down," quipped one of my classmates as he took a few steps further out into the parking lot before lighting his cigarette. Indeed, the Briess plant in Chilton, with its manual pulleys and noticeable lack of computers, felt far more artisinal than I had expected. Consider, for example, that a full batch of chocolate malt provides enough "dark malt" for several moderate-sized brewpubs to make stouts for at least a year. And what differentiates one chocolate malt from a darker roasted malt that a brewer might want to use? The employee who's been working at the roaster for 15 years just knows "when it's ready." And he does. The visual inspection tests they do are consistently confirmed by the work done by the quality assurance chemists in the lab next door. The director of operations, who gave us an introductory presentation, was insistent: the human eye is the best test they have for batch readiness.
It was a reminder that brewing beer, particularly craft beer, is deeply connected to agriculture and dependent on the work of twenty-one folks who operate a small malting plant. Prost to them!
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