Kickin’ it with Kaspar Schulz
We’ve learned so much over the years that we’ve been making malt.
Remember, if you will, that we started out as farmers. Growing barley? No problem. 75+ years and five generations of experience. Making malt, however? That’s a new skill. Very new. 6 years and 6 months new to be exact. In fact…want to know a small insider Root Shoot secret? Todd didn’t even attend his first class on how to make malt until 3 months before the malthouse opened.
That’s right. We built an entire malthouse before we even knew how to make malt.
That’s kind of shocking, even to us. It gives us serious anxiety in retrospect if we think about it too long. Luckily, despite our rather non-traditional timeline of doing things, it all seems to have worked out in the end. We do have a few malt medals under our belt, after all.
Still, when it comes to the world of malt and beer, we’re very aware that we’re still newcomers. For every one thing we learn, there are twenty more new things to dig into. We put priority on staying curious, remaining humble, and trying - every day - to learn more.
For years, it has been a pipe dream to take our malthouse team to Germany. If we are the youngsters dabbling in our newly found malting prowess, Germany with its centuries of experience and its exacting and unwavering emphasis on excellence, is the grandfather we look up to.
This year, after much planning, plotting, and with a generous sponsorship from Kaspar Schulz, the company that made all of our malting drums, we were finally able to make that dream a reality. The malthouse team spent a week in Munich and Bamberg, touring every possible beer and malt-related establishment and asking so many questions that most folks finally just gave us beer to get us to quit talking.
Among the many highlights of the week:
—> Touring Weihenstephaner, the oldest continuously operating brewing in the wold. Kicking out amazing beer since 1040. 1040! We can’t even wrap our heads around dates like that in the US!
—> Visting Germany’s hop region of Hallertau. We check out the German Hops Museum and then visited GenussHof Pingold, a hop and fruit farm (they make fruit-based spirits, too!) that cooked us up an amazing dinner.
—> Malting day and facility tour with Weyermann Specialty Malts! Holy cow…this place. They’ve been at it years, so it’s inspiration for what we could be…a few generations down the line!
—> Visiting small, family breweries like Weiherer Bier and Schederndorfer Landbier. They even clued us in on the tradition of Frühschoppen… the custom of meeting up (usually on Sundays) for a late-morning beer. That’s a tradition we can get behind!
—> Touring the Kaspar Schulz facility where we got to see (really, live and in-person!) how they manufacture and assemble their gorgeous, stainless-steel brewing and malting equipment!
—> And finally, visiting thousand-year-old sandstone mines that have been used since medieval times for brewing facilities: from floor malting, to natural fermentation, all completed 10 - 30 meters underground. One brewery we toured - Schlenkerla - still uses these mine caves for their beer production! We’ll be talking more this month about Schlenkerla and some of the amazing work they do, but as part of our very important cultural lessons there, we learned that the verb schlenkern in the local dialect means “to sway, or swing, sort of while hunched over.” (Translation ours, the best attempt we could manage after several German/English/Germisch explanations and more than a few sample beers.)
When one learns the verb schlenkern, one must immediately put it to use, so us being us, an underground brewery tour somehow turned into parking lot beers, a dance party, and well…this.
Really, it couldn’t have been a better week.
We had fun, yes, but we learned so much. We’re excited to keep digging into some of the ideas we gathered on our trip, and maybe work on some new malts and beer collaborations with our partners.
With a Weihenstephaner Vitus in hand, of course. When it comes to inspiration, there’s nothing quite like a thousand years of experience…and one amazing trip to Germany.
Prost!
— The Malthouse Team
