I'm Emmet with Clawhammer Supply today
we're at Riverbend Malt house in
Asheville, North Carolina
Brent my
business partner and I started the business in 2010
Brian and I worked as
environmental consultants out on the
coast and when the housing market crashed
we went looking for encore careers when
we started there were no craft malsters
in the country there was like one other in
Colorado and then another one starting
up about the same time in Massachusetts
Okay
when we started looking through the lens
of finding something that was tied to
sustainability and supporting local
farmers malting quickly rose to the top of the pile
we just saw craft beer
beginning to explode and saw a need for a
malt supplier in our region
in its most
basic form what what is malting
malting is essentially wetting grain getting it
to germinate and then drying it back
down so a brewer can use it in a mash we
take that to the super-high science level
it's pretty nerdy stuff we're
nitpicking but that's what we do here
there's really like five parts to malting, most people just talk about
the three parts which is steeping
germination and kilning but on the front
end of that you've got sourcing cleaning
and grading before it even gets to the
malt house once it comes in here it's
pretty much ready to go into the steep
tank which we have right up here this is
a two-ton steeping vessel that's been
custom built for Riverbend you're just
steeping that in water just water we run
them three cycles basically of
submersions
in between each of those cycles there's
an air rest period that can vary from 8
to 12 hours generally speaking once the
grain starts to germinate it'll have
what's called chit during the chitting
stage it'll go onto the floor where it
starts to respire
so right now we've got it's Kentucky
distillers malt on the floor
this is actually a new R&D project for us
so this three
were about middle of day three of
germination right now
the rake is our
turning unit we turn the material to get
fresh air in co2 and other gases out
and keep the material from matting up
we turn the material two directions three
times a day every single day
we're keeping the humidity very high we want to
approach 100% humidity in the room we
keep the temperature around 60 to 62
degrees and we're monitoring the
temperature of the bed itself too if the
temperature starts getting too high
you'll get all kinds of crazy things
happening in there that you don't want
if the temperature gets too low you slow
down germination to a place that it's
not developing anymore okay
and then how
much longer will this have to go?
we'll put it in the kiln tomorrow
okay so that's pretty much we're pretty
pretty close to being done okay
so now we've
steeped you've germinated and we're going
to go into the kiln we try to do most of
our kilning within a 24 hour window in
that there's several stages like you
have an open free dry you'll do a force
dry you'll do a curing so in the free
dry stage we're really just trying to
get the moisture out to the point that
germination stops a lot of people think
the heat stops the germination it's
actually the removal of water which will
stop the germination process so the
modification once it gets once it runs
out of water it just quits modifying
okay and then you'll develop all your
color and flavor in our curing process
which is after you've pulled most of the
moisture out that's for a base malt now
if you want to add some color there's
other tricks at the beginning where
you're going to steam or recirculate air
back through it's kind of like brewing
you know any number of temperatures and
times and pathways to do what you want
to do right you know yeah on this side
of the building we're all manual over
here we're still floor malting in the
traditional method and then on the other
side of the building we're pretty much
fully automatic so you guys do both
floor malting and pneumatic malting
could you just give a basic difference
between or likeness between the two ways
to malt so the floor malted material is
germinated literally on a floor it's a
very traditional technique we've now
built a custom malting system that's
pneumatic driven and fully automated
that helps us to mimic what we were
doing in our floor malting process
except it's fully automated so this is
our large pneumatic steep tank holds
ten metric tons or about 22 thousand
pounds of dry material plus two or three
thousand gallons of water it's fully
automated so once the grain goes into
the tank it'll do its first steep
cycle then we'll pull co2 off and do a
second steep cycle and it'll probably
transfer that via slurry which is
that line ok the 6 inch stainless steel line that
goes into that vessel right there which is
a germination kiln combo
that's the all in one I guess
yeah what's different
about that than what we do on the floor
well conquering my fear of heights today
is on the floor
you're moving that rake through there
to get the heat out and get oxygen in
in this vessel I'm constantly blowing
that air through there and controlling
the temp at all times it's a pretty
elaborate system we have a bunch of data
that comes off of that so with the
pneumatic process it seems like you can
do a lot of customization and kind of
dial it in for something specific is
there anything you're kind of doing
outside the box with that system yeah
with the the new automated setup we're
actually have the ability to offer
custom malts some of the things we've
done recently are like a windblown or air
malt we're doing some darker wheat for a
couple of people we have malted corn
which a lot of other folks aren't able
to do so basically a brewery would
probably come to you and be like hey
we want to brew this specific beer and I
found I found a historical beer style
there's a particular malt that went into it can
you emulate that we can try it's been
very interesting to kind of explore
what's happening in modern craft brewing
and also look at a throwback to
traditional practices and see how that
fits into this process because there's
there's a tie between those two spaces
for sure
so basically all of our material when it finishes kilning
we transfer it using a vacuum into the
Meridian hopper over here comes out through that conveyor
belt the orange piece over here
into this rootlet conveyer actually
rootlet auger basically because it's
growing and you've got rootlets on there
you need to knock that off
so this auger you get enough volume in
there it'll actually kind of abrade
itself and knock off the rootlet material so this is
the first stage of cleaning exactly yeah
but yes it'll go through this auger here
up the bucket elevator and then over
into the seed cleaner sorter separator
that's where you have different sized screens depending on what what grain we're
cleaning basically we're trying to get
this as uniform size as we can
so all our thin material will fall out into this guy
and then what happens with this stuff
we'll we'll go ahead and we'll give this
to a farmer gotcha
and then for anyone who likes meat
he brings us a pig a couple times a year
Sweet that's like a fair trade
Yeah
That's sweet
I don't eat meat but ok
but everyone else likes it so
*laughs*
Yeah so while we're
cleaning we're pulling a sample
throughout the entire process so
typically every five to ten minutes
we're pulling a little scoop off the
side you want it representative
throughout the entire batch and then
with that sample we'll go ahead we run
in house sensory with it
we're in the middle of batch qa/qc using the hot
steep method that was developed by the
society of brewing chemists you're
essentially making a malt tea
the idea for us is that we're using this to assess
malt quality we want a true to brand
product hitting the streets each and
every batch so we're looking for each
batch of pilsner to hit a known color
spec and a set of flavor attributes
um...
you know I'm looking for sharp acidic
off flavors if it's too toasty if the
color's too dark if it's too rich in
flavor it should have certain notes like
biscuits bread honey some green tea in
the finish
craft malt is judged a little
harder than your commercial malt houses
we're the new guy on the block and so we
have to exceed expectations to meet what
our brewer's demands are
basically right now we've cleaned our barley
we've got two row pilsner in here right
now we've got it up in this hopper here
so everything that's clean we can fit
five tons in there it's gonna come out
of this hopper and then into this
automated bagger right here
next it goes through the sower
so basically that happens we get
another guy down at the other end of our packaging line here
*ding*
we'll do about 2,000 pounds on a pallet rows of
five bags per row so eight rows tall
how long how long would it take to do
like the full...
it kind of depends on who's operating
it
gotcha but if you got the a-team in
if you got the a-team you can do a pallet in about 15
minutes
Would this pass inspection?
pretty close pretty close
not at all
I might re stack one or two
*laughs*
and then obviously besides me who bought
a couple 50-pound 50-pound bags
besides homebrewers?
yeah besides home brewers who like who
is your main customer at the end of the day
regionally specific craft brewers
and specifically most north carolina
craft brewers are our target audience okay
we have about 150 customers a year
almost all of those are based out of the
southeast
I know Sierra Nevada's using
some of your grains and also I know New
Belgium has and obviously
New Belgium has in the past we've done a little bit
with the Canarchy group Oskar Blues we
Wicked Weed
Burial Beer
Fonta Flora is a
great customer of ours okay
it's a pretty phenomenal set up here
thanks!
I really appreciate you taking the
time out of your day to let us come
check out your amazing facility and it's
been a treat it was great thanks a lot
