Crafting as a Community: Craft Malt Conference 2023

 It was so good to be together again. 

Photo: @activebeergeek

After three years of remote Craft Malt Conferences, we (and everyone else we met) were thrilled to be able to meet with our craft malt community in person again. Friends and colleagues, handshakes and hugs, beer and whiskey in glass-clinking toasts were a welcome change from the COVID shadows of the last few years. 

Fun and learning.

This is what the Craft Malt Conference has always been about for us, and not necessarily in that order. (Learning and fun?) The truth of the matter is that in this type of gathering, the two are inextricably combined. 

Like most of the businesses at the conference, we have spent the last three years growing and learning, working and improving, but it’s never the same to do that work in isolation. So when we landed in Portland, ME we got right to business making up for lost time (and catching up on lost beer tastings in the process!) Thanks to open door policy of local breweries and malthouses, as well as the excellent planning of the Craft Maltsters Guild, we learned a lot. A few of our highlights:

Blue Ox Malthouse and the Floor Malting Community:

We visited Blue Ox Malthouse in Lisbon Falls, ME (just outside of Portland).  Another multi-medal winner of the Malt Cup competition (they won a bronze in both the Pale Malt and the Light Munich categories,) they are a floor malting facility that is about to quadruple in capacity with a pending expansion. Owner and head maltster Joel Alex showed us around and explained how they use Maine-grown grain in their malthouse, sourced from farms in the northern part of the state. We’re always fascinated by visiting floor-malting facilities as they are so different from ours and we discovered that there are even more places doing floor malting than we realized. There’s more than one way to produce quality malt, and these folks are killing it.

Allagash Brewing Company and all the Maine Beer:

In addition to checking out Blue Ox, we also had the opportunity to tour Allagash Brewing Company in Portland guided by head brewer and Craft Maltsters Guild board director Branch Rothschild. We downed some Allagash White, their flagship Belgian-style wheat beer, and learned about the cutting-edge work they’re doing. They have an in-house coolship that they designed and built. (No idea what that is? They’ve got a great explanation of it here.) They’re also doing a mixed-culture fermentation program. It’s a pretty amazing place! We also managed to hit Harpoon Brewery, Portsmouth Brewery, Maine Beer Company, and Trillium Brewing Company. We could have continued the beer tours for the entire weekend (you know us!) but we also had some learning to do, which brings us to our biggest highlight…

The Conference and Learning:

The Craft Maltsters Guild did excellent work planning interesting talks on a wide range of topics. Of particular interest to us: the panel discussion about American Single Malt Whiskey. (Because, you know…we’ve got a Root Shoot American Single Malt Whiskey coming out, soon…) American Single Malt is going to be a huge part of the whiskey market in the US and beyond, and we’re so excited to be a part of that. We also got tips and tricks from Emily Hutto of Radcraft on “Using Craft Malt as a Megaphone” - a topic we’ve been highly invested in for years as we try to tell the story not just of the malt itself, but the entire farming and family process behind it.

The Craft Malt Conference consistently allows us to strengthen relationships with like-minded businesses, share knowledge, and keep up on industry trends. 

It also allows us to meet with our people. And it’s the people - always the people - that make this conference so great.

We are always honored to be a part of this community, and we hope always to serve the craft malt community in any way that we can. We’re here, we’re engaged, and we’re excited to show up and spread the craft malt word.

One American Single Malt Whiskey (and locally-brewed beer!) at a time.

Distillery of the Month: Distillery 291

Hardmade the Colorado Way

Our grain here at Olander Farms…it’s…well…it’s a little pampered. 

Photo courtesy of Distillery 291.

Just think about the luck these little seeds landed when Todd selected them for planting. They get to spend their days in the bright Colorado sunshine, stretching up toward crystal blue skies, while enjoying unobstructed Front Range views from their neatly formed field rows. And while some Colorado seeds may land in stressful situations, (Colorado soil isn’t the richest and conditions are almost always dry and hot, after all) the Olander Farm seeds enjoy regeneratively amended fields, carefully managed nutrients, and snowmelt irrigation. 

Even after harvest, they’re treated like royalty. No long trips in semis. No undignified treatment at the local grain elevator being unceremoniously tossed about, weighed, and packed. No traveling hundreds of miles to be shoved on a barge or piled into a hot silo far from home. No, sir. Our grains aren’t just some run-of-the-mill commodity. They’re the heart of what we do. They’re the result of all our hard work and years-long collaboration with Mother Nature. They’re a little piece of Colorado terroir wrapped up in a tiny seed that will join forces with all its seed buddies to make boldly delicious beverages. 

Photo courtesy of Distillery 291

This is why we love working with partners who appreciate the art, science, beauty, and the total Colorado-ness of our grain. 

Distillery 291 ranks high among these locally-focused, artisanal producers. Nestled in the stunning foothills of Colorado Springs, Distillery 291 is a globally-acclaimed, yet locally-focused small-batch distillery. 

Founded by Michael Myers a former New York City fashion and beauty photographer, Distillery 291 aims to capture the essence of the Old West: their whiskey is Rugged, Refined, Rebellious® just like the frontier days of lore, but it’s also high-quality. Every batch is made from scratch and moves from grain to barrel to bottle by hand, and has since day one. 

Distillery 291’s original still (right) connected to their new still. Photo courtesy of Distillery 291.

And their work is positively…a work of art. One that, in fact, started from literal works of art: Distillery 291’s first still was handcrafted by Michael himself from his own copper photogravure plates. (For those of you not up on photography terms, photogravure plates are copper plates upon which photographs are etched. Prior to film, photogravure plates were the primary photographic technology.)  

It isn’t surprising then, that a distillery so committed to quality and beauty as to create liquid art from actual, physical artworks, has won copious awards. An unbelievable amount of awards, really. This is just the “short” list:

• American Craft Producer of the Year - 2022

• World's Best Wheat- 2021

• World’s Best Rye-2018

• Best American New Make-2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 

• Best American Wheat- 2021 & Best American Rye-2018 by World Whiskies Awards 

• 6 Masters & Luxury Masters from the Spirits Business Journal

• Multiple Double-Gold in San Francisco World Spirits Competition

• 16x Liquid Gold in the Whisky Bible and 2-time US Micro-Whiskey of the Year (Runner-up 2020, 2018)

And so, when we think of places for our pampered Olander grains to finish out their life cycle in glorious fashion, we couldn’t select a better one than in Distillery 291’s bottles. From that original photogravure still, Distillery 291 has grown to a 26,000-square-foot production facility making some of the most highly respected whiskeys in the world.  

Photo courtesy of Distillery 291.

The most recent release among these whiskies? The All Rye Colorado Whiskey crafted with (you guessed it) 100% Rye Malt from Root Shoot Malting and finished with toasted aspen wood staves. This whiskey’s Batch #1 offers a unique flavor profile with notes of cinnamon, raisin, french toast, Irish breakfast tea, sawdust, plum pudding, black pepper, and salted caramel.

Made with Colorado-grown, Colorado-malted, pampered grains raised in the shadows of Longs Peak. 

Interested in snagging a bottle? You can order online at 291’s website. Better yet, join one of their tour and tasting events or simply head to their tasting lounge where you can try sips of special releases rarely found in the wild as well as all of their standard, award-winning bottles.

Big, bold, beautiful bourbon. Unapologetic rye whiskey. 

Local Colorado malt.

With partners like Distillery 291, even when we have rough days at the farm, we know that every little thing is gonna be…

All Rye.

Brewery of the Month: Green Mountain Beer Co

Old World Brews with Colorado Soul.

What could be more Colorado than craft beer and rock climbing?

Well, sharing craft beer and climbing adventures with friends, perhaps. Or maybe craft beer + a running club + friends. Or what about a dog-friendly brewery, founded by friends and built on the side of a small mountain in the foothills that hosts a regular running club (plus a myriad of other events including trivia, bingo, and an open mic night)?

This is Green Mountain Beer Company. A small brewery in the western suburbs of Denver, Green Mountain Beer Co emanates Colorado soul. Founded by those rock climbing buddies (and longtime friends) that we mentioned Cassidy Hill and Brian Milhaupt, have worked hard to create a space that serves up craft brews inspired by traditional methods but that cater specifically to the tastes and desires of the Colorado community.

What does this look like?

It looks like a killer beer menu with a wide range of offerings including everything from a must-have IPA (Kama Citra, a single hop citrate IPA) to a Ryefecta Imperial Stout ( 2-rye, high-alcohol, high-hopped ale) to a chill, seasonal Watermelon Sour, brewed exclusively for those dog days of summer.

In fact, Green Mountains beer offerings read like a bucket list for the craft beer aficionado. Imperial Saison Ale? Yes, please! A Crushable Pale Ale? Always. Port Wine Barrel Imperial Brown? Have I died and gone to heaven?

All of this beery goodness was the brainchild of many a dream-big conversation between Brian and Cassidy on their climbing trips throughout the western US. Unlike so many dreamers, however, these two actually had the know-how, skills, and - most importantly - the gumption to make their dream a reality. With Brian’s background in professional brewing and an education in chemistry, and Cassidy’s background in food and beverage service with an education in business management, they were able to join forces (along with a crew of good people) and make Green Mountain a reality.

A beer with Colorado soul must have Colorado ingredients, right?

Right.

Using local ingredients is written into the mission statement of the business, and Green Mountain was actually one of our very first Root Shoot customers. Opening in 2016 (the same year as us!) Green Mountain first tried Root Shoot grain in a few brews. Impressed by the flavor and efficiency, they moved away from the other companies they were sourcing from and started using Root Shoot exclusively for almost all of their base malts.

Seven years later, we’re thrilled to still count them among our community. In fact, just last month, the whole Green Mountain crew came to visit the farm and share a few beers with us. Just look at this awesome bunch!

And afterwards, Cassidy provided what might be the best description of Colorado Soul in the craft brewing world, as he reflected on attending the very first Field Day we ever held.

It was stormy that day when we visited the fields and watched the combine harvest the grain that we use to brew our beer.  You could smell the wheat and barley on the wind.  High gusts blew over the canopies of the beer vendors in the field.  We retreated to the farmhouse to share locally brewed beer, brewers eating from the same table as the farmers that grow our grain, and watched the late fall Colorado storm blow over leaving us with a rainbow and a smile. 

Farmers, friends, and fields. Grain, brews, and beers.

Thank you, Green Mountain for sticking with us since the beginning…

…and for all the soul you bring to this amazing industry.

Cheers!

— RSM

Malt of the Month: English Pale Ale

Malting is both a science and an art, and striking the perfect balance of both of these disciplines is our English Pale Ale.

Root Shoot’s alternative to the traditional Maris Otter malt, English Pale Ale may not have the long and storied history of Maris Otter, but it is a malt through which we have begun to tell our own story…and the story of so many spectacular local beers.

Designed to be the gold standard for our brewers, English Pale Ale was created with the goal of building a malt with a little more color than traditional Marris Otter. Color and flavor often follow each other in the kilning process and with our English Pale, we shoot for a color of 4-6 SRM as we find the most flavorful beer happens here. We hit the sweet spot, literally: a little color but also still holding onto all the potential extract inside the kernels. The chew on this malt is full of flavor, and the hot steep….beautiful.

When incorporated into brew days, the English Pale hits the figurative sweet spot every time and it especially shines in dark beers, giving them a depth of character and a magical toasty breadiness. Case in point? Upslope’s Oatmeal Stout, a Craft Malt Certified beer that hinges on English Pale’s goodness. Liquid Mechanics has an oatmeal stout out as well: one featuring Root Shoot’s English Pale and Honey malts, as well as some of our Malted Oats.

But English Pale isn’t just for dark beer. Zwei Brewing has Pale in Comparison: a clean and crisp ale with a malty body and notes of tangerine and tropical fruit..and even our distillers get in on the action. Bendt Distilling Company in Texas is such a fan that they’re making whiskey with full drum batches of English Pale.

However much we may wax poetic about our English Pale Ale malt (which, we know, is a lot) it’s really the numbers that speak most clearly. English Pale is our fastest-growing malt, hitting 100% growth in year-over-year data.

As the prices of Maris Otter continue to rise, we see an even greater opportunity to spread the English Pale gospel. It’s locally grown, lovingly crafted, rooted in family farms, and designed specifically for small businesses who know that brewing the perfect beer - and distilling the perfect spirit - happen at the intersection where art and science meet.

English Pale curious? Reach out, give us a shout, come to the malthouse for a taste or to try a hot steep.

We would love to introduce you.

Sandstone Cellars, Smoked Beers, and our new Schlenkerla Dance Moves

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

Malt of the Month: Munich Wheat

Brewers and distillers don’t get to have all the fun.

The craft beverage world is full of creative thinkers: artisans pushing the boundaries of their craft, professionals adding just the right touches to make their work shine, free-wheeling adventurers willing to buck trends and try something new.

With brewers experimenting away in their brewhouses, and distillers exploring all the possibilities of their stills, we too wonder what the world of possibility is with our malting drums. 

Over the last year, our team has spent a lot of time thinking about what we can do to be the best version of Root Shoot possible, and how we can keep our customers and our craft drinkers excited about craft malt. We’ve got a lot of awesome things planned…and Munich Wheat is the first of these. We wanted to bring forward a limited run of something cool.  Maybe we’ll do these experimental runs a couple times a year...maybe just once. Who knows? Only time and our drum schedule will tell.

What we do know is that we want to put something awesome in your mash tuns on the regular. 

And this Munich Wheat…well…

It is kind of awesome.

How’d we get here?

We wanted to explore the world of flavor beyond our traditional Malted White Wheat.  So, we took our malted white wheat, germinated it as usual, and sent it to the kiln with an entirely different kilning profile. We made sure the grain was full of moisture, then blasted it with high heat, applying the same kilning process that creates all the rich, complex flavors in our Munich 10 malted barley. We locked in that flavor thanks to the Maillard reaction - the reaction of sugar and proteins to heat that causes the distinctive flavor of browned food....think of how toast darkens as it warms.

What came out of the kiln was a beautifully browned, toasty, super complex malted wheat.  For all of you brewer nerds who love these things, we’ll tell you that the flavor contributions coming from the hot steeps are deeply malty and slightly sweet with nice body.  Lab results have put its color at 6 SRM. 

For those of you who don’t know hot steeps or Standard Reference Method (SRM) we’ll just tell you that this wheat came out…awesome. Amazing.

Really dang good.

It’s a limited run, however, with only about 10,000 lbs available. That may sound like a lot, but - hypothetically speaking - if someone were to make a Belgian Blonde with some Root Shoot Pilsner and the new Munich Wheat, our own Maltster Mike just might come and drink all of it, in which case 10,000 lbs will go very quickly.

We’re intrigued to see what our brewers and distillers come up with. So, we promise to keep you posted as those Munich Wheat beers (and spirits?) roll out.

In the meantime, if you need us, you can find us in the malthouse, snacking on handfuls of the stuff and plotting our next special release…

Cheers!

- Your Root Shoot Malting Team