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#4 Matt Drew - Malting & Single Malt
1.1k Plays4 years ago
Matt Drew has an interesting a varied history in music, advertising, marketing and coffee. Now he brings all of that to bear in the world of American whiskey as a maltster and the host of a kick-ass new podcast called Single Malt Matters. In this episode, we talk about the process of malting and how to get stuck in your self at home with minimal equipment. We also get into the state of single malt in the USA and many other things. Listen to Single Malt Matters at: https://asmwpodcast.com/
Transcript
Introduction to Craft Challenge Coins
00:00:00
Speaker
Today's podcast is brought to you by the new Chase the Craft Challenge Coins. These are available on the website chasethecraft.com under the Shop tab. If you are one of the people that like a specific number, these coins go from 1 to 250. There is a spreadsheet on the website that will show you what numbers are available. It's also brought to you by the Stillett and Chase the Craft Patreons.
00:00:25
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thank you so much team i do not get to do this sort of thing without you guys i do not get to talk to interesting people like this without you so thank you i thoroughly appreciate it i'm sorry we had some technical difficulties and we were not able
00:00:40
Speaker
to do the question and answer session with Matt properly like we were supposed to. I will try and get that sorted out for next time. Also what I'm going to attempt to do where possible in the future is upload the full video file without some of the edits to Patreon for you as
Meet the Guest: Matt Drew
00:00:57
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well.
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My guest today is long overdue for this podcast. His name is Matt Drew. He's a professional maltster with a background in marketing and advertising and he's also got his own podcast called Single Malt Matters. He's a super interesting guy that I've been happy to call an internet buddy for about a year now.
00:01:17
Speaker
He's also got a background in radio, so you know his podcast is super slick, not like this hot mess. We do take some time in this podcast to kind of get into the guts of the actual molting. We talk about Matt's background and how we got into this profession, which I think is important for those people that are considering getting into the industry somehow.
00:01:38
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But rest assured team, we do get into the geekery and the practicalities of malting corn, both professionally, commercially, and most importantly, probably for the listeners here, how you can do it at home, pretty much on a shoestring budget. So without a further ado, Matt Drew.
Matt's Career Journey and Transition to Malting
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Matt Drew, everyone. We are live.
00:02:05
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Finally, dude, we're live and this has taken a long time to get set up, but I'm glad it's happening. Finally. Hopefully not the last either. I'd like to, uh, I'd like to check back in with you every once in a while. Oh no. Yeah. We're going to be doing this. We're going to be doing the semi-regularly I would imagine. And by our time, and that's probably once a year, but anyway, do you want to, do you want to tell everyone, uh, what the hell you do and how you ended up doing this?
00:02:35
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Oh, man. So I'll give you the expogated version. My my and it's cool, too, because the story ties in with you indirectly. Oh, OK. Which is kind of it's kind of interesting that you and I have have found our way together because our our our past, even though you're in New Zealand and I'm in Montana, you know, our past are kind of intertwined, which is super cool. But
00:03:02
Speaker
My, my professional background is primarily in marketing and advertising. Although I did start off, I was, I was in radio for about, on and off for about 10 years. But, but back then here in the States, what happened is our Federal Communications Commission started deregulating ownership laws and relaxing laws on, on
00:03:28
Speaker
how many radio stations could be owned and operated by large corporations. So what happened was we had these massive broadcasting conglomerates coming around and buying up all the mom and pop radio stations, firing off all the programming staff and then hiring high school kids to babysit satellite feeds. So that very quickly became a very wise career path
00:03:49
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to follow. So my undergrad degree is in, it's split between advertising and broadcasting. So I decided to go more of the advertising route and got plugged into different sort of well-known brands, McDonald's, Claritin, ClarinX, their allergy medication, Chevrolet. I worked on the Chevrolet business for a few years. And
00:04:17
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and a bunch of other clients. But the thing with that was I was getting burned out on that. And at the time, when the last pivotal moment in my career happened, I was in Chicago.
00:04:32
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And I grew up in Washington state. I was born and raised in Washington state here in the Pacific Northwest. So I wanted to get back closer to home. And I found a job in Las Vegas, which was closer to home from Chicago. And I'd never been to Las Vegas before. So I figured out, you know, what better way to explore Las Vegas than to move there. Your first mistake.
00:04:57
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So I moved to Vegas and and I headed up the MGM Grand account on the account side. That would have been wild for the ad agency. Yeah, it was it was super cool. But that's how I met my wife, because she was the director of marketing at the time for the MGM Grand. So when we first met, it was in a client status meeting.
00:05:15
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And so my one to two year stint in Las Vegas turned out winding up with two dogs, a marriage, a house, and an additional five, six years onto the plan. So we decided we wanted to start getting serious about a family. Las Vegas is not the best place to do that.
00:05:36
Speaker
And so, yeah, I know. It's a strange concept. Sin City and raising well-adjusted normal children is just not a good match. So, so moved to my wife and I, we sold our house, we moved to North Texas. And this is where things start to converge. And my wife took on a position on the marketing side in the casino industry out there.
00:06:03
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And here, the economy at the time here in the States sucked, man. This was after the whole global economic meltdown was in full swing. And that all started in Las Vegas, by the way.
00:06:17
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I'm not sure if a lot of people realize that, but that whole subprime mortgage lending crisis, that all started in Las Vegas. And our house was one of those houses. Oh, well. Yeah. Our $400,000 house that four months later we bought for $265,000 by the time we went to sell it four years later was appraised at $140,000.
00:06:41
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And so, yeah, it was, it was challenging. But anyway, I couldn't find a job at the time, full time. So I was doing some consulting. And the consulting always resulted in similar conversations with the clients, you know, you're just kind of getting to know them and shooting the shit a little bit. So the conversation was always like, Man, we can't find a decent cup of coffee here.
00:07:04
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Like there's just no good coffee here and that region was booming and a lot of people were moving in and it's just like, well, wow, there's no good coffee here. There needs to be. And so having grown up in the Pacific Northwest and kind of cutting my teeth on Starbucks back when Starbucks was still good. Wait, Starbucks was never good?
00:07:25
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In the beginning, yeah, back when it, because here's the thing, like at the time before specialty coffee was really a thing. Oh, when it was actually coffee still. Yeah, Starbucks was specialty coffee and that was it. And so, and so it's like, that was the first thing that really turned people on to coffee. And at the time when I first started drinking it, the only place you could find it was, was Washington state was back home. They were still small.
00:07:48
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And so I decided to, I'm an outgoing sort of entrepreneurial type guy.
Craft Distilling and Craft Malt Movement
00:07:56
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So I took up the challenge and started my own specialty coffee brand. But by that time, I'd also been making liqueurs for over a decade.
00:08:06
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And just the combination of those two, through getting to know people in the specialty beverage category in North Texas, that led me to Jonathan and Robert Likrish at Iron Root Republic, up in Denison, Texas. And I started to run for me, always lead back to Iron Root.
00:08:23
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I know. I know. I seriously, I think, man, those guys are just setting it on fire. But but but what they're doing, I mean, they are really poised to start doing some really cool stuff and have people pay attention to it and take notice of it like now. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They just won best corn, best bourbon in the world again. Yeah. Again, it's a big deal for them.
00:08:50
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just like, Oh yeah. Which, uh, which one you want to send them? Want to send them this one? All right. Yeah. That'll win because they, they are so unassuming and humble in their approach to everything. Yeah. They're just rushing it.
00:09:10
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Crushing it so hard. Yeah. And they're doing it the right way. They are an excellent case study in do it right versus doing it fast and doing it cheap. And that's where a lot and that's not just distilling. I've seen it in the coffee world as well. I mean, basically any any business that has a capital expenditure aspect to it by the most expensive equipment right out of the gate because you're going to wind up spending less in the long run because if you are the cheap shit,
00:09:39
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It's just going to break on you and you're going to probably wind up replacing it in a year anyway with the stuff that you should have bought in the first place. But that's what these guys are doing. I mean, that's, that's the way they started off. So, um, so at the time they were still a brand new distillery, like nobody really knew about them at the time. And so it was really good. What? 2014, 15, somewhere in there. Uh, yeah, I, I first crossed paths with them. I think 2013, 2013, 2014. And so.
00:10:09
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Um, I, as, as I kind of established more of a relationship with them, by the way, I, I, I, and my wife and my daughter still, I mean, we, we consider the licorice family sort of extended family for us now. Um, Jonathan's daughter and my daughter kind of were besties back in the day, you know, the third birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese was, you know, um,
00:10:34
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But, but as I got more involved with what they were doing, and, and bear in mind, I've always been a specialty beverage nerd and have always been into it. It started off in craft beer. And then that translated over into coffee for business reasons. And just, that's what I'm passionate about is specialty, specialty beverage. And so one of the conversations, I'll still, I'll never forget this day, I sat down with Jonathan, we were doing some tasting and some blending.
00:11:03
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And I told him like, man, I, I'm loving this. Like I've, I've been a bourbon guy. I've been a whiskey guy. I've been a single malt scotch guy for a long time without really considering myself to, to have been a student of the craft prior to that point. And so what
00:11:23
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what I told him at the time was, look, I want to be a part of this, but I don't know that I necessarily want to be a distiller because I mean, that's the, that's its own like massive rabbit hole to jump down. And at the time, you know, I'm in my late thirties. Uh, I just turned 45. Uh, actually a week ago today, I just turned 45. Happy birthday. Hey, thanks man. You had a good trip too. Uh, I did. I did. Um,
00:11:55
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I remember most of it. Anyway, uh, you know, I, I, I told him like, look, how do I get involved with this? Where are the biggest needs right now? Because you know, marketing and branding and advertising, that's always in my back pocket. I mean, that's just, that's just kind of how I perceive the world is through a marketing and a brand perspective. And once you learn a trade like that, you can,
00:12:22
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It's just always with you, right? Like you can plug it and play into anything you do. So now when you create a coffee business, for example, you don't have to do an enormous amount of research and stress out a whole lot about the marketing and advertising side of things because that's just going to come second nature. Now you've got to go and learn about coffee on a commercial.
00:12:42
Speaker
Yeah, I think, I think a lot of it too and where a lot of people fail is, is they don't focus on the passion. They don't focus on the interest side of it enough. They, they're, they're, and it, it's definitely,
00:12:55
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important to look at it from a business case perspective because it has to make sense in terms of what the business is and establishing that brand. But at the end of the day, you still have to take that passion and run with it because that's what got you there in the first place. Yeah. Anyway, sorry, man. Carry on. So what wound up happening right out of the gate
00:13:21
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He said, you know what, if you, uh, if you started, he's like, do you know about malt? Like, what do you mean? Like, what do I know about malt? I know what malt is. I've been doing homebrewing and I have been, you know, sort of at arm's length to the craft for a number of years. So I am aware of the concept of malt, but.
00:13:44
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But I don't really know, at the time, I really didn't know from a technical perspective what that meant. And he said, look, here's the deal. And this is in the very beginning. So here in the States, we have the Craft Maltsters Guild, which is a brand new thing. And it started up right at about this time. I was one of the first members of the Craft Maltsters Guild. And that's what he said. If you could start a malt house,
00:14:13
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with as much brewing and craft beer and now craft distilling as there is happening in this region, man, you'd be sold out the day you open the doors and you'd never have to slow down and look back. And so I started, I started, I took that to heart. I started studying it.
Montana Craft Malt and Local Grain
00:14:30
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I started reading. I started doing online research. I got my hand on every grain that I could and figured out how to malt it in my kitchen.
00:14:43
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And that's the thing is like, okay, and then what? I wasn't brewing at home. I didn't have all grain brewing set up in my house. I didn't obviously, because it's illegal in the States, I didn't have a still. It's illegal in the States.
00:15:00
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And so and then it just kind of went from there. So that was 2015, 2015 ish. So then my wife and I moved and my daughter moved to Colorado and I kept studying it. But we weren't sure exactly what our long term scope and our long term plan in Colorado was. So I just kind of hit the pause button on all that.
00:15:26
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And then wife found a job in northern Nevada near Lake Tahoe. And at the time, so one of the things, we're a very, as I'm sure you know now with the time that you've spent here in the States, we're a very transient society. Like it is unusual for people to stay in the same place for too long.
00:15:51
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Um, and like, for example, uh, just myself, since graduating from college, I've lived in Washington and Oregon and Chicago, all different places in Illinois, New Jersey, Texas, uh, Las Vegas. I was in Japan for a while, uh, and, and just kind of, you know,
00:16:12
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we do this. So, so my wife and I, since we have gotten together, we lived in Vegas, and then we moved to Texas, and we've moved a couple of times within Texas, then to Colorado, and then to Lake Tahoe. And one of the things that we do is whenever you're thinking about moving someplace, you look at a couple of things.
00:16:33
Speaker
the breweries, you look at restaurants, you look at the school system. If you've got kids, you know, you look at the school district and you look for coffee and those are really the four important things. It's like, okay, if you can, if you can tick off each one of those things, let's go, you know, because if it doesn't, if it doesn't work out, we can just, we can just move in a year anyway. Right? I mean, that's always kind of in the back pocket. It was basically,
00:17:01
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Things I can drink. Oh, and the kids. Yeah. Amen. Kids get thirsty too.
00:17:11
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And so, um, yeah, that was the cool thing too. Just to side note, like when I, I was running my coffee business, my daughter was just, uh, she was maybe two, like one and a half to right around that range. And so I used to bring her on board and she would kind of take orders and, and, uh, she was, she was kind of my sidekick, but she, she was drinking vanilla lattes at like, so, so she, so she knows what good coffee is all about. But, uh,
00:17:39
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But when we made the move to Reno and Lane Lake Tahoe area.
00:17:45
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I was amazed at how few based on the population there at how few breweries there were specifically, you know, there were a couple of distilleries. And that's the thing is, is craft distilling has, has finally gotten to a point through deregulation and just relaxing the laws where it can, it can really be its own thing here. And it has been now for a few years, but it wasn't always there. So I think, I think in a lot of ways, that whole industry is still kind of, I won't necessarily say in its infancy, it's growing, but there's still a lot of room there.
00:18:14
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There's a spark there that hasn't taken off, man. It's not craft beer yet. Not yet. I'd say we're maybe 10 to 15 years behind craft beer. And craft malt too. But craft beer kind of started it all.
00:18:37
Speaker
So me, you know, having malt in the back of my head, my first thought was, well, maybe it's because they don't have access, or easy access to quality grain, because that's becoming more and more important as well.
00:18:48
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and local grain and having more of a regional flavor. And really the bigger thing is, especially for even the regional breweries, to have a seat at the table in terms of their raw material that they're starting with and not just opening up the BSG catalog and saying, oh, I want to power that. In development and flavor profile.
00:19:09
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If the small guys have access to someone that will actually listen to them and take notes on what they desire and what they're trying to chase, what they want things to do,
00:19:23
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I mean, they've never had that, right? No, I mean, and they didn't, it's becoming more of its own thing. And that's why the Craft Monsters Guild exists. And that's why it started because there are so many smaller and mid-sized craft breweries that are paying attention to feedback from their consumers and they want to have more control in how they,
00:19:50
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get their hands on grain that are going to be able to deliver what their consumer wants. And their consumer wants something local. They want to have something that is, first of all, interesting and has a story. But they also want to know that they're playing a role in contributing to the local economy.
00:20:08
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Yeah. And that's important. And that's a growing thing. And we're seeing that too in craft distilling as well. But out of that was born the need for the craft malt movement to really start and be its own thing. And so when we're in Nevada, I decided that, you know what, I'm picking this back up and I'm gonna start my own malt house and I'm gonna run with it.
00:20:35
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So I found, you know, I was getting the letters of intent signed. I had the business planned. I had the branding all done. I had a business partner. We had land and it was, it was well on its way.
00:20:49
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And then a friend of mine actually also, here's the weird thing, man, it's weird how, how, how well can I hear? So there's a gentleman named Nick Hammond, who just started Pacific Coast Spirits down in Southern California. And he, while I was at
00:21:09
Speaker
in Texas working with Ironroot, he came there. His family historically has always been in the winemaking business, and they wanted to start a distillery. And so he reached out to Ironroot Republic to say, Hey, can I come and shadow you guys for a couple of weeks and just kind of check out what you do to get a better feel for distilling and, and, and basically, you know, what, what, what to look at and what to move forward with. So that's where I met Nick. And
00:21:35
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as I was getting letters of intent sign, I contacted him because I knew he had his distillery that he was working on. And so he signed a letter of intent. He said, hey, by the way, there are you concerned about these guys out in in the Carson Valley that are doing their own malt house? And I hadn't heard of these guys before. And it was it was in a state distillery. I'm not so it's called Bentley Heritage and super, super cool operation.
00:22:03
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set up in, in Minden, Nevada, which is south of Carson City. And distillery complex, they actually have two distilleries. One, one of the distilleries is for American-style, so the Burbins and the Ryze, also vodka, gin, basically all of that stuff they all do in this one distillery.
00:22:22
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The other distillery has these massive foresights, copper pot stills, and those, that facility is designed just to do single malt whiskey and brandy. And I, so I looked them up and turns out they were looking for a maltster. And so I thought, this might be a good opportunity to
00:22:49
Speaker
be able to do it and to make the stuff and to be the malster, but not have to sign and, and, and, you know, be the guy that's making all the capital expenditure decisions. Well, it's, you know, opportunity to get your feet wet in the industry at least. Yeah. Well, that's the thing, you know, I, I, I had been, like I said, I'd been malting before and I, and I understood it. And that, that was basically, you know, when I reached out to them, I told them like, look, I,
00:23:18
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I don't have a master's resume. Um, I have, I have a, an awesome marketing guy and advertising guy's resume, but.
00:23:29
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I understand malting. Here's what I've read. Here's what I've studied. I had already at that point made the commitment to go up to the Canadian Malting Barley Technical Center in Winnipeg, Manitoba, which is basically if there is such a thing in North America as a malting school, that's it. So it's a week long intensive malting course. I'd already made plans to go to that course. They have, they have that course a couple of times a year.
00:23:55
Speaker
And so I told them, like, Look, I get it. I am a maltster here. I just, it doesn't translate to the resume. And so, and I've got the passion for it. And this is what I want to do. So if that's important to you, and that makes sense, and that's, that's enough to start the conversation, I'd love to talk. And they got back to me right away and said, Yeah, let's talk. And so I was there, I was on board there for a couple of years, I was their maltster. And
00:24:19
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And then through the course of just networking there and becoming more of a, not only a member, but sort of a
00:24:32
Speaker
a good consumer advocate for Kraft Malt through my time in the Guild. I kind of crossed paths and I was introduced to the person who had started up Montana Kraft Malt here in Montana and really, really cool operation.
00:24:58
Speaker
And at the time, the original conversation was focused on me coming on board with them to be their maltster, to be their head maltster.
00:25:06
Speaker
but at the end of the first telephone interview, we were just kind of shooting the shit. And she said, so, you know, how did, how did you wind up at Bentley? Like tell me about your career and what have you been up to? And, and I basically told her the same thing that I told you about the marketing and the advertising. And she immediately pumped the brakes on the whole malster. She said, wait a second. Did you say marketing? Like and branding? Yeah. And sales? Yeah. And you're a malster.
00:25:36
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Hey, like hear me out. Hear me out. Um, because, and that's the thing she knew, she knew going into it that I was really passionate about, about the malt side on, on the production end, um, in terms of being the guy making the stuff.
00:25:54
Speaker
But at the same time, she also said, Look, I've been interviewing people for this job. And every single one of them has one component of the marketing side. But not a single one of them has any idea what malt is all about. So and you've got you've got the whole package. So I need you for this job. And, you know, again, I'm just a few hours from my hometown in Washington State.
00:26:17
Speaker
we were, we were at a point, mainly because of my wife's job, where, where we needed to kind of reconsider where we were and what we were doing. And with my daughter going into first grade, it was like, Look, we know, because the schools in Nevada suck.
00:26:32
Speaker
You're listening and you're in Nevada and you have kids in the public schools, I'm sorry, don't take it personally. Get a tutor. It's important. If you love your kids, get a tutor. Because it's like, you know, it breaks your heart to have your kindergarten kid come home in the only way that she knows how to hear her tell you that she's scared for her own safety at school. You know, that sucks. That sucks.
00:26:58
Speaker
And so, so, so we moved here. I started off working with, with Montana Craft Malt. We're a brand new malt house out here. And it's cool because, you know, we're talking about how important earlier, how important the passion is in what you're doing. And I'm passionate about every single aspect of what I'm doing. It's like, if I could tailor make a job,
00:27:23
Speaker
For me, based on my personality, like there's every aspect of what I'm doing here is exactly what I would do. And so it's cool. I've got, I've got input on the production end. I understand. I understand the process, obviously. And that makes me a great tool for, for brewers and distillers because I speak the language and I can take what they're giving me in terms of feedback. Like, for example, everybody here in the States talks about two row.
00:27:53
Speaker
Like, oh yeah, but as a malt type. And so, but, but that's the thing is they all have a different idea of, of what that means. And I, and that's part of what I'm doing is saying, you know, two row actually isn't a malt type. It's, it's, it's a subspecies of grain. I mean, that can be accessed under two row.
00:28:16
Speaker
Yeah, I've even had people ask me like, wait, well, so if you were to describe two row in a way that makes sense in terms of a specific malt type, what would you call it? Like, well, basically, it's either a pale malt or a pilsner malt that was off spec.
00:28:39
Speaker
And a lot of that has to do with the color. And so they'll blend off-spec pale malts and pilsner malts and call it a pale malt in some instances or call it a two row. But it's just, it's a real general term that has gotten popular with brewers and they just kind of take it for granted. They're basically just saying, I just want a general high extract base malt. That's all it is.
00:29:04
Speaker
So yeah, so that's where we are now. God, beautiful, cold, gorgeous, sunny day here in Missoula, which is awesome. I'm in Missoula, Montana, which is in the northwest portion of the state. We're near Glacier National Park, which is awesome. Nice. Yeah, you got everything there, man. It's an awesome part of the country. I've heard a lot about it, but I've never been there. So I think next time I head over that way, I might have to come visit you guys, I think.
00:29:34
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, man, I'm, I'm sitting on the futon. Nice. Warming it up for you. So before we go, what I really want to do, and I know that a lot of the listeners are wanting to get into the sort of the medium potatoes of molting itself. But before we do that,
00:29:58
Speaker
We need to mention your little side hustle at the moment. He looks a little too comfortable in front of this microphone, guys. We're going to let you know why. So I started, and this was something, and I talk about this a little bit in the first episode.
00:30:19
Speaker
I started a podcast about American single malt whiskey. And it's the idea for it kind of it's weird. Like, you know, you talk about the creative process and some of the best ideas come at you come to you either in your sleep or when you're like in that half asleep, half awake zone. Yeah.
00:30:37
Speaker
It's about three o'clock in the morning. One morning a few months back, I just popped out of bed because that's one thing that was bugging me. And it had been bugging me since I was on the production and on the supply chain side of American single malt whiskey because Bentley Heritage, even though they're making some phenomenal spirits, the long term strategy for that distillery is to really hang its brand hat on American single malt whiskey.
00:31:03
Speaker
Right. The challenge with that is that in the eyes of the TTB, our governing body here that oversees distilled spirits, from a regulatory perspective, that category doesn't exist. It's gobbledygook. It doesn't mean anything. And that's a huge challenge because it's a growing category that doesn't exist.
00:31:26
Speaker
So it's the Wild West in terms of what you put in the bottle, but also the flip side of that is that there's no, the consumer has no real expectations or understanding of what that bottle is going to be like when they pick them up and buy it, right? So the people can do what they want at one end, which means that the other end, when people go to the store and think, I like this certain flavor profile or I dislike certain things or, you know, they can't reach for American single malt and have
00:31:56
Speaker
any idea whatsoever of what they're going to get in the bottle. From the TTB point of view. But in actual practicality, the filmers are almost regulating themselves, right? Yeah, exactly. To a greater extent, and I actually will speak with a gentleman in the... It'll go live two episodes from now. He's got kind of a different take on it. But again, in terms of the TTB,
00:32:25
Speaker
it doesn't matter, because again, it doesn't exist. Which in some, like, I can see both ends of the argument, right? In some ways, it's kind of like, we've got this opportunity to do something really cool. Let's define it and make it ours. And then, you know, make it a special thing. But then there's the other side of it is,
00:32:42
Speaker
Well, it's the wild west, so we can do whatever the fuck we want. Yeah, exactly. From a creative point of view, that's really cool. But at the same time, any business savvy consumer aware distiller is going to understand that when you use that term,
00:33:00
Speaker
It's going to mean something in the eyes of the general consumer because they know what that means in general terms. And that has been adopted now. Obviously, it started in Scotland, but it's been adopted in India. It's been adopted in Taiwan. It's been adopted in Japan, although they're having their issues right now from a regulatory perspective too, but that's a totally different subject.
00:33:23
Speaker
But in terms of the person who is drawn to something called single malt, there is an expectation there. Now, are distillers producing that juice with that
00:33:39
Speaker
understanding and expectation in mind. Yeah, generally. But it turns out that that the mash bill is not even really the biggest concern. What is the biggest concern and the biggest pushback from the craft distilling community is the need to age that whiskey in first use American oak barrels. And the reason for that is so far from what people expect, right?
00:34:07
Speaker
Yeah, well, I mean, and see, and that's just it is, is that, you know, you think about scotch, right? Because they all use ex-urban barrels, like 99% of all scotch is aged in ex-urban barrels. And if it's not a succession, that's an ex wine port, brandy. So it's always something barrel. Yeah. But but what, what happens is,
00:34:32
Speaker
By the time and think about, too, where the majority of those barrels are coming from, like Kentucky and Tennessee, hot climates where, you know, barrel respiration is a big thing and it's a massive thing. And then you take those barrels, which now have had all of those vanillans and all of that char compare. The char components like removed out of those barrels. Yeah. They've been seasoned with that bourbon.
00:35:01
Speaker
And now they go over to nice, cool and consistent, like very steady climate Scotland. And the barrel respiration is a completely different thing over there. And so that really allows a lot more opportunity for the spirit to shine through and for the flavor of that malt to shine through. And what we're finding over here, like Belconus is a perfect example in episodes.
00:35:29
Speaker
five and six. I was in Colorado, speaking, speaking with Michael Kirkpatrick, he's the guy that does the music for the podcast. And he's a bourbon drinker and a tequila drinker. And he, he, that's part of the reason why I wanted to talk with him. By the way, the podcast is called Single Malt Matters.
00:35:49
Speaker
We got way off top, okay. Yeah, let's just plug your podcast real quick and move on. 10 minutes later, we still haven't actually told anyone what the hell it is. Yeah, exactly. So Stick Ball Matters, it's available wherever you get your podcasts, iHeartRadio, Apple, Google Play, like it's all over the place, Sticker, Anchor. And it's in its infancy still. I think that's like the fifth episode is the last one out. But I'm telling you right now, guys, it has turned into
00:36:18
Speaker
And I'm not blowing smoke just because I'm talking to you. It's turned into my favorite spirits podcast hands
Exploring American Single Malt Whiskey
00:36:24
Speaker
down. Thank you. I appreciate that. And my pleasure, man. Absolute pleasure. And it's great for someone that straddles the line between caring about the craft and chasing the craft themselves, but also just being a enthusiast of the product, right? Because it kind of straddles that
00:36:49
Speaker
It's not only for drinkers of single malt. It's not only for professionals of single malt. It's not only for home distillers. It puts all of those interests into one thing and then pulls them all closer together. That's what I get from it anyway, and that's why I enjoy it.
00:37:07
Speaker
No, absolutely. And it's actually really rewarding to hear you say that because that was my intent going into that. That was my hope. That was my goal. And on the malt side as well, because I talk about malting. And, you know, if you're talking about single malt whiskey, it all starts with the grain.
00:37:28
Speaker
And as you say, the barrels getting out of the way so that that molting process and the selection of the grain and fermentation and everything else is so much more important because you've taken that giant wood candy component and dialed it right back. Yeah.
00:37:46
Speaker
Yeah. And, and one of the interesting things is that when we opened up the Balconis, uh, single malt, which was delicious. And I would absolutely buy that. I mean, it's a, it's a staple. Uh, you know, I love that stuff, but
00:38:00
Speaker
it very clearly has that almost bourbon American flavor complexity to it. And it's really a testament to how much of a roll the barrel plays in the flavor of that finished spirit. Because it tastes like a cousin of bourbon, but there's no corn in it.
00:38:22
Speaker
You know, it's a hundred percent bar. Yeah, it really is. And and and it makes sense. You know, they're down in Waco and it gets hot and humid there. And so those barrels are going to do some pretty dynamic things in that environment. But
00:38:37
Speaker
looking at it from, and again, going back to the standard of identity for American single malt, the, the, basically the words American and single are superfluous. They don't even matter. They're just, they're just kind of stuck on the front of it. You know, you might as well call it, you know, Jesse's blue hat malt whiskey. Yeah. Same thing.
00:39:04
Speaker
But the only thing that matters is the word malt whiskey. And in order for it to be called malt whiskey, it has to be, obviously you've got your proof, your distilling requirements on your proof level and where you enter the barrel at. But aside from that, it has to be at least 51% malted barley.
00:39:24
Speaker
and aged and first-use American oak barrels. And those are the two things that are, I think, the biggest components of what the American Singamalt Whiskey Commission is actually working toward having changed and updated and have it turned into its own thing from a legislative perspective.
00:39:42
Speaker
All right, cool, man. So if you haven't figured it out yet, guys, I thoroughly recommend you check out Matt's podcast. So make sure you go do that now. Like you said, it's available on pretty much I think every pod catcher now, dude. If your little niche pod catcher doesn't have it, I'm sure he wouldn't mind a message. Or you can also go to the website. It's on all the episodes on the website. It's asm w podcast.com.
00:40:12
Speaker
There you go. Definitely check it out, guys. Wherever this goes live, I'll put a link to it in the show notes. But now that we're 40 minutes in, let's delve into... For what it's worth, I'm not even done with the dram for my first bottle, and I've got four bottles here, so we got plenty of time. Dude, I'm so pissed off at you. It's not even 8 o'clock in the morning yet.
00:40:39
Speaker
I'm drinking Montgomery single malt whiskey distilled right here in Missoula, Montana. And these guys are doing some phenomenal work. So I think they're distributed out of state. But if you have the means, I definitely recommend you check it out. That's the other cool thing about American single malt. Nobody knows what it is.
00:40:59
Speaker
And so you've got the nominal with keys that are priced. I mean, if you were to put this stuff in a, like a, a corresponding bottle, triple price on it. Oh yeah. All right, mate, let's get into the meat and potatoes of molting. So I think first, do you want to go over it from a kind of a high level theory point of view of what molting is? And then we can kind of get into the specifics of how you do it.
00:41:27
Speaker
Sure. So the purpose behind malting, if anybody has ever taken a raw barley kernel and tried to chew it, it'll break your teeth.
Malting Process Breakdown
00:41:42
Speaker
And there are a number of reasons for that. The first one is, and the main one is that
00:41:48
Speaker
all of the stored energy in that barley kernel, because the kernel is designed obviously as a seed to grow the next generation of that plant. And so it has to have as much compact, complex carbohydrate stored up as possible in order to give that plant the energy it needs to get to the point where then the roots and photosynthesis can take over to finish the process.
00:42:13
Speaker
And so what malting is, is a controlled germination process. And it happens in three stages. The first one is steeps and air rests. And that's basically designed. So if, if, if, and I can talk about the anatomy of a barley kernel from a very general perspective, basically, you've got your endosperm.
00:42:34
Speaker
You've got your embryo, you've got an allure own layer that surrounds the endosperm, and the allure own layer is where once you get the moisture content of that grain to a certain point, enzyme synthesis starts to happen.
00:42:52
Speaker
So what happens is the moisture, which is absorbed through a sponge on the basal end of that kernel called the micro pile, it's it basically is soaked into that barley kernel and it hydrates kind of outside in from the base up.
00:43:10
Speaker
And so typically, if you were to look at a diagram of a barley kernel, the one point where if you ever have like they call it steely tips where where some of that grit is not fully modified and friable when it's still hard, that's why is because that's the hardest part of that barley kernel to hydrate and.
00:43:34
Speaker
what you have to do in the beginning of the malting processes. First of all, you have to understand what kind of barley you're starting with. And that's important because different barleys are going to have, in general, different protein levels. And if you're talking about in terms of distilling and enzyme potential and conversion potential, you want to have a nice balance between high extract
00:43:59
Speaker
but also you want to have a high enough protein where it brings diastatic power and enough enzyme potential in order to fully convert all of that high extract carbohydrate. And so what happens is once you hit about 33% moisture content to that grain, and you're starting anywhere between
00:44:21
Speaker
like six and in a perfect world, six and like nine and a half percent moisture content on the high side. And what you're doing is is you're steeping that grain, you're getting it wet. And you are going to start the process of germination. And
00:44:42
Speaker
once you get to a certain point and you just have to get the feel for it, because the barley will tell you, if you know what to look for and you know how to ask it, the barley will tell you what it needs you to do. And you're going to let it soak for, for, you know, hours, and then you're just gonna let it rest. You're gonna drain that water out.
00:45:02
Speaker
you're going to let that that barley kind of dry out a little bit and realize that it wants to start waking up. And that's typically you're going to be at about 25% moisture content.
00:45:13
Speaker
And so you want to make that grain really thirsty so that when you go into your second steep cycle, it it's really ready to take that water in and get that process kickstarted. Generally speaking, you don't want to go into a third steep. Sometimes you have to. There are there are in cases of really high protein barley or, you know, other extenuating circumstances, there are going to be times where you're going to need to go into a third steep on on the production scale and the commercial world.
00:45:43
Speaker
what, what we're seeing is more and more big, large scale malt houses call their third steep, the beginning of germination. Cause what they'll do is they'll lay all that grain out in their germination vessels and they'll just start dumping water on it in there and just let that water trickle down through the grain bed. And that essentially does the same thing, but more efficiently. And they can start the process earlier in the germination stage.
00:46:06
Speaker
And so from an efficiency perspective there, that also helps. Plus, that opens up the steep tank for them to get the next batch steeped in and going. So there are all kinds of cool tricks. So, sorry, man. So the first step is essentially just telling the seed, you've got an environment to grow in. Yep, time to go. Start making a new plant. Yep. So you've given what it needs to start growing. Yep. So once you do
00:46:33
Speaker
you hit about 33% moisture content of that grain and germination is going to is going to be pretty much in full in full effect. So what's happening though is that as that moisture content is growing through that grain, you're softening that barley kernel, you're softening that endosperm. And at the same time, you're telling the allure own layer, hey, start getting those enzymes going, because we need to start breaking down these complex carbohydrates, because that's the energy potential that that grain needs in
00:47:02
Speaker
in order to grow the next generation of that plant.
00:47:06
Speaker
And so the job of the maltster is, is first of all, knowing what you're starting with, because that's going to tell you what your end product is going to be. Because if you've got a, like, for example, if you've got a nine or a nine and a half protein content barley, which is super low protein content for barley, that's going to be a really good malt for like a traditional German style brewer, because
00:47:33
Speaker
if you brew with a high protein barley, that's going to put haze in your beer. So so really traditional German brewers who were trained at like Weinstaffan, they want really low protein barley because the other side of it, too, is typically you're going to have higher extract potential as well as well. So
00:47:52
Speaker
But you need to know what you're starting with in order to know what the finish line needs to look like. And so then it's controlling the process throughout the whole stage of, you know, up even through Kilning in order to get to that point. So as your
00:48:11
Speaker
hydrating that grain, you're softening the kernel. And then you're also giving those enzymes a really, it's a path of least resistance, really, for them to go in and the enzymes will start breaking down those complex carbohydrates into simple shorter chain sugars, sucrose, fructose, galactose, maltose, I mean, dextrose. I mean, there's all kinds of different sugars and all kinds of different enzymes that play a role.
00:48:41
Speaker
funny, so not funny, but interesting sort of bit of trivia, diastatic power, which everybody knows, everybody who's got, you know, any, any background in fermenting grain, or, or, or fermenting with grain understands and has heard the term diastatic power. And that comes from back in the 1800s, when we started figuring out, we were just in the very beginning stages of understanding what enzymes were, the enzyme was called diastase.
00:49:12
Speaker
And so the diastatic power was essentially the measure of diastase or enzyme package in that grain. And, and now we know that it's, it's, it's alpha amylase, it's limit dextranize. I mean, there's, there's, there's different components to it, but you know, that's kind of an interesting sort of side note is that's where that word comes from. So that word was just a, like a catchall for the magic stuff that takes what is in this and turns it into something that yeast can eat.
00:49:39
Speaker
Yep. Yep. And now I know it's not magic so much. So still a part of magic. So when you get, when you get, when you get that grain to about 42 to 40%, 42 to 44% moisture content, that's when you know you've got, as long as you're starting with good quality malting barley grain, and at least 95% of your kernels are showing signs of germination or chit, it's called.
00:50:05
Speaker
And a chit is just the white nub that starts popping out the bottom or the basal end of the barley kernel. And that's what is going to become the rootlets and then the acrospire or the stem of the next plant. So once that starts happening, then you go into germination.
00:50:22
Speaker
You control that germination process, typically three to four days, it takes. And again, it all, the job of the maltster, it's really equal parts art and science, because you have to understand from a biochemical perspective what you're starting with and what your limitations and parameters are in order to control that process. But the artistry comes in the fact that
00:50:51
Speaker
you're basically you're trying to dance with mother nature and and mother nature is a bitch you know she sucks you know she won't yeah she'll do what she wants when she wants and and you know even if you like you you look at at malt europe or great western malt um these these guys they're there's batch sizes are 400 450 tons
00:51:15
Speaker
And so just based on batch size alone and from an efficiency perspective, all they're doing is cranking out base malt all day, every day, the same thing. But even at that scale, you cannot.
00:51:29
Speaker
replicate a batch identically. It's impossible. And, and, and that's why it's so important from a malting perspective to understand the process and, and to understand the variables that could present themselves. The other side of it too, and I've dealt with this as well, equipment issues.
00:51:48
Speaker
I think it's the universal thing. It's whether you're brewing, you're distilling, you're mauling, it doesn't matter. You're going to have equipment issues and you need to figure out how to adjust and how to make the necessary changes in order to still get through the process and finish out that batch. Once you've germinated to the point that you're happy with it,
00:52:15
Speaker
halt that process, right? Because you don't want a new baby. Bali plant. You want malt. What is the next step? So if we're talking about like, for example, and part of that is understanding where you need to stop, what that point is you're looking at. And that's going to vary depending on the malt type and what kind of malt you're making. But let's put it in terms of just like a base malt that you're that you're going to use for an all malt if you're making a single malt.
00:52:43
Speaker
Uh, how, how you, how you establish what that point is, is kind of two things. The first one is you want to do a steep index and you want to figure out how well hydrated that grain is.
00:52:57
Speaker
And there's a very easy test. It's called a Chapin test. C-H-A-P-O-N. So you can Google it and look up how to do it. But basically, you just take a little bit of barley, put it in a tea ball. You boil it. You put it in boiling water for a while. There's a specific time that you put it in there. And then you pull it out. You take 100 kernels. You split them down the middle. And you can tell by looking at the inside of that endosperm how much is hydrated and how much isn't.
00:53:23
Speaker
because it's like, does it look chalky? Or does it look translucent? If it's translucent, it's hydrated. If it doesn't, then it's not. So that's going to show you how well hydrated your grain is. And that's going to indicate how well modified it's going to be because you can't modify or, or malt that section of the kernel that isn't well hydrated.
00:53:42
Speaker
And so the other part of it is you're going to look at that acrospire growth throughout the whole process. And same thing, you just take a sample of barley kernels, you peel the husk off on the dorsal side, and then you look at the grain and you measure the length of that acrospire or that tiny little stem in relation to the length of the entire kernel.
00:54:07
Speaker
And so if you're making a well modified base malt for all malt distilling, you're going to want to have at least ninety two percent of those kernels in the three quarter to one range, one being that the length of that acrospire is equal to the length of the kernel.
00:54:28
Speaker
It's the same or at least three quarters the length. And depending on how you're killing it and how quickly you can stop that process, like, for example, what I was doing back when I was at the distillery, I needed to actually go into killing early because I didn't have a powerful enough fan on my kiln in order to dry that grain down fast enough. So I basically had to make a Vienna malt.
00:54:56
Speaker
and go into sort of a shorter hyper modification period before it actually got to a low enough moisture content and high enough temperature to stop the modification process or the germinating process. And so at that point, again, depending on what you're making and what you're starting with, you'll know what you're looking for in order to say, okay, time to go in the kiln.
00:55:20
Speaker
The kiln is going to be the tool that you use, first of all, to stop germination, stop modification, and basically freeze the process in place. And that is broken into three different phases. The first one is called free dry. And free dry is we're talking about the moisture content of the grain when you start it, right? So the grain, that's a tappy spot. That's a tappy place. It wants to be about that moisture content.
00:55:49
Speaker
And so above that is all basically free moisture that you just have to dry off and the grain isn't going to have any problem driving drying that off at all. It's like, Yeah, I don't want that anyway. I don't need that. And so it's basically low temperature, really high fan speed, and blowing off that moisture as quickly as possible.
00:56:08
Speaker
Bear in mind, too, that the malt type that you're making is going to be in part defined by how much enzyme that finished malt brings to the table. And the higher temperature that you kiln at
00:56:23
Speaker
the more enzyme destruction you're going to have. So if you want a high enzyme malt, you're going to want to kill at low temperature. And again, going back to the all malt distilling, you're really not going to want to kill up to more than 54 C.
00:56:44
Speaker
I mean, that's that's really the high end of where you're going to want to kill that, which is really low. That's low temperature in terms of killing. But if you want to try that for that, like what's what's the flip side of it? What do you why don't you just always kill at that sort of temperature flavor?
00:57:02
Speaker
flavor. And the other side, the other side of it, too, is, you know, we we talk about barley development and barley breeding and efficiency and agronomy and what that barley brings to the table. And this is part of the reason why we're seeing less and less six row out there, because for a long, long time, six row barley was always used because it had to higher diastatic power.
00:57:26
Speaker
And that's because it was higher protein. And especially, you know, when you've got when you've got when you look at a six row barley head, those distal ends are these really funky, weird shaped, small kernels that don't really fit the other four rows. But those distal ends, those distal kernels have the highest protein content by volume, and they offer you as a malster the highest enzyme potential.
00:57:55
Speaker
Right. But they're just a pain in the ass to work with. And so as a result, and and on top of that, you've got, you've got higher loss coming off of the field through the combine and even cleaning your grain going into the malting process. A lot of those kernels are going to get cleaned off because basically your machines are looking at those like, like they're thins, or they're broken. So there's enough. But with
00:58:22
Speaker
With those challenges and, frankly, Anheuser-Busch and some of the bigger breweries in the States really driving what has been happening on the barley side of things and in barley development and barley genetics, we've really come a long way in growing and developing
00:58:45
Speaker
two-row barley cultivars that, first of all, have really high percentages of plump, really high diseased resistance. So we don't have to worry about Fusarium as much. We don't have to worry about Dawn. And of course, you know, a lot of that, a lot of that has to do with agronomical conditions. Like you're never going to want to grow barley in a field that you grew corn in before, because then you're just asking for troubles.
00:59:10
Speaker
But they've been bred with higher disease resistance, with better hole retention, a higher percentage of plumps, and higher enzymatic potential as well. And so as those two-row barley cultivars have been developed, we've really decreased the need to look at six-row. So for example, the American Malting Barley Association last year completely defunded all research specific to six-row development.
00:59:35
Speaker
Wow. Okay. That's gonna work. Yeah, we're seeing less and less six row and two rows king. But that's part of it. You know, you don't have to worry about that as much anymore. I mean, it's it's, and it's cool from a malting perspective, because it's very forgiving.
00:59:49
Speaker
and there's definitely more margin of error there for you as a mulster. As long as you have a good general understanding of what you're doing and why you're doing it, you're gonna be able to have a usable product at the end of the process. That's cool, man. So I think that's an in-depth overview of the malting process. Maybe let's get into
01:00:19
Speaker
how people can actually do this at home, right? Because I think that's what people are going to be interested in. And I have to imagine the first thing is how do I get my hands on and what do I look for when I'm looking for a raw, you know, like a raw product to start this with? Have you got any suggestions there? Yeah. So the good news, the good news for, uh, distill, if you, if we were talking about it in terms of distilling. Yeah, sure. Um,
01:00:48
Speaker
A really good Pilsner malt or base malt is going to make for a great all malt distilling grain. It's going to be excellent for that. So if you were to, you know, go to your local home brew shop and just get a pale malt. If it's me, I would probably want to go for a pale malt because there's going to be a little bit higher color there and a little bit more flavor potential.
01:01:12
Speaker
And part of what I'm doing and my personal mission has been to really take the conversation specific to all malt distilling beyond just talking about performance in distilling. Yeah, totally. Just to back up for a second, what he's saying, guys, is that the history of distilling and the history of malt in distilling for the longest time has been
01:01:40
Speaker
give me as much sugar per kilo of malt as I can possibly get and that's the performance right so high amounts of potential energy essentially and high amounts of diastatic power so that you can throw other adjuncts in with it as well at high levels if you want to like corn or wheat or whatever rice even
01:02:02
Speaker
and be able to convert that as well. So what you're saying is your mission, your quest is to get past that and to start talking about the malt itself in terms of the flavor contributions that it's going to give in the bottle and not just the impact on the wallet per bottle, essentially.
01:02:23
Speaker
Exactly, exactly. And and and that's part of the reason, you know, going back to the need for or the requirement to age in first use oak barrels. That's why that's so important, because there is a lot of nuance. If you taste new make spirit from four or five different barleys,
01:02:43
Speaker
that are all malted to the same level in the same recipe, they're all gonna have differences. They're all gonna have their own unique characteristics. I mean, shit, even like one of the barley cultivars that I love and it's kind of becoming the number one malting barley on the craft side here in the States is called Copeland. It's a Canadian barley. And I malted Copeland for a long time. And
01:03:07
Speaker
The interesting thing about that is that the area that Bentley was growing their grain in, I mean, they've got a 65,000 acre ranch and they were actively farming on about 6,000 of those acres, but they were spread out in different pivots throughout the Carson Valley. And so the same source seed came in and it was planted in three areas of the valley. And what happened was,
01:03:38
Speaker
All of those grains that were harvested at the end of the season from those three different areas were evaluated independently and they all had different characteristics. So even though they all started with the same grain, it wasn't the same grain when it came off the field.
Flavor and Barley Characteristics
01:03:53
Speaker
And that translates into unique flavor characteristics. So even though you've got the same stuff and it's all got the same name, it's going to be different. But a lot of that nuance is lost when you throw everything into a first use oak barrel, because now you're just covering it up with that barrel complexity.
01:04:10
Speaker
But kind of moving back there. Yeah, we've done it again. We're weary. So finding something that someone can molt at home and we do get it. So an un-molt, you know, really too molt. Bali, where do people find that?
01:04:30
Speaker
Yeah, so you go to your homebrew shop. And I would, I would specifically, if you can't get a C, if you can't get a certificate of analysis on that grain, then I would look for something else. Because you want to have a really good understanding of what you're starting with. And you can't just take the name of it at face value. I mean, you really have to have a better understanding. Because here's the other thing, too. What a lot of the bigger malt houses do is they'll blend.
01:05:00
Speaker
Um, and, uh, they, they'll take, they'll take different barleys and malt them to different specs and then kind of blend them together at the end of that. It's not, it's not, color or whatever. It's like taking it back to coffee. It's like what Starbucks does. You know, when you get the breakfast blend, the Starbucks breakfast blend, the beans in those bags, you can hold two bags up to each other. They'll taste exactly the same, but the beans came from completely different geographical areas.
01:05:29
Speaker
But that's why they do it. They blend them in order to hit a spec. And so that's what a lot of the places do. But they'll get that grain analyzed, they'll get that malt analyzed. And then typically, you'll be able to get a COA on on that grain. And the most important thing that you're going to look at there is, you know, obviously, your, your protein, that's the number one thing.
01:05:55
Speaker
So do a lot of homebrew stores in America hold unmolted barley? Some of them do. But here's actually, this is a good point. I don't really know what they do in other countries. Like I don't know in like New Zealand, how easy is it to find barley?
01:06:13
Speaker
Oh, malted barley is everywhere. Homebrew stores, like the home brewing culture is pretty good here, but I don't know about unmaltered barley. Yeah. And if you, so is that what you would call it? If you walked into a homebrew store, would you say, I want to malt my own barley. What unmalted barley have you got? Was that what you would ask for?
01:06:32
Speaker
Yeah, I'd ask for raw barley. And here's the thing is that a good home brew store, like, for example, like a Montana craft malt, we're working on developing relationships with home brew shops, not only just to be a distribution point for a malt for home brewers, but also to let them know, like, you know, if you need, if anybody wants grain, they just want raw grain.
01:06:56
Speaker
We can do that too. I think that's becoming more of a thing. But that said, you know, it just depends on where you are and what you have access to. I, I'll be honest with you, you know, I'm gonna look right now as we're talking, I'm gonna go on Amazon and see.
01:07:18
Speaker
Now that we're talking about like, well, wait a second, can you get it on Amazon? Because if you can, man, that is. Well, at least that's accessible for everyone in America, right? If you can get it on Amazon, then if you're in America, well, I guess maybe not the very tippy top or Hawaii. I mean, the other thing is too, man, that a lot of
01:07:41
Speaker
A lot of the people that are going to actually try this, it's not about creating something amazing. They're not 100% dialed into worrying about having the perfect grain to start with. They're just interested in the process, right? They just want to be able to do it themselves. They want to be able to experience it.
01:07:57
Speaker
So even finding like feed barley, like a giant 25 grain sack of and actually that would even be better because grain feed is going to be higher, higher protein content. Yeah, it's so so from that perspective, it's going to bring it's going to offer you more in terms of diastatic power and enzyme potential. But at the same time, you got to understand going into it that it's going to be a little bit difficult to malt.
01:08:23
Speaker
And you're going to need to probably let it spend a little bit more time in steep before you go to germination. So I'm no expert in picking what you would want to, because I'm thinking, what I'm thinking here is it's probably going to be easier for people, especially in weird places that, not weird places, but places that can't, you know, don't have access to great homebrew stores. That's probably an easier route to go. You're going to want to check the back of that bag though, because a lot of feed
01:08:53
Speaker
In New Zealand, that's not so much of a problem. In New Zealand, if people are going to feed something to a cow, they generally just give it barley. That's what's in the bag, much more so than in America, where I guess people that are supplying feed want to put IP
01:09:10
Speaker
sort of economy or IP value into the products they're making. So when you look at the bag of the bag and the ingredients, it's not just barley. There's going to be all sorts of bollocks in there. Be aware of that. Check it out. The least amount of extra crap that's in that bag, I have to imagine is better because you don't want all the rest of it.
01:09:32
Speaker
I, yeah, it's one of those things that we're not going to be able to recommend specifically, unless we're talking about a specific region. So yeah, that's just it. Um, you know, craft malting, here's the other thing in the States, craft malting is, is taking off and their craft malt houses all over the place. Yeah. I call up a craft malt house and say, Hey, can I get like five pounds of barley?
01:09:58
Speaker
Yeah. And the other thing too is they're more than willing, cause I know a bunch of malt houses, they love talking malt with people. So if you just call them up and you can actually, you can find craft malt if you go to the craft maltsters, if you're in the States and if you go to the craft maltsters, just Google it, the craft maltsters guild, you can go to their website and all of the member malt houses are listed there. You can find your closest craft malt house and just call them up. The phone number's right there on the website and just tell them to come in.
01:10:27
Speaker
You want to talk to them about malt and maybe, you know, they'll be happy to send you with some malt because it's cool and it's helping further the cause. But yeah, basically wherever you can get your hands on any barley. And I would say even if you really want to get a better understanding of it, don't just stop at barley, you know, get different types of wheat, get red wheat, get hard red wheat, get soft white wheat, get, I mean, I've malted quinoa before.
01:10:56
Speaker
Um, back before seltzers, hard seltzers were even a big deal. And, uh, you know, just get your hands on different grains and just play around with it because they're all going to do their own thing. Malt some rye. Uh, because here's the other thing too. When you start talking about malting other small grains, rye is going to come up and because rye is a pain in the ass to malt.
01:11:21
Speaker
But it's so cool. It makes such a delicious malt. It's really it's it's worth the effort. But you just have to I mean, it takes skill to malt rye really well. And same with oats, malted oats and malted rye for very similar reasons. You've got very high beta glucans, Arabinazilans, pentasans. I mean, and these are all these really gummy, gooey proteins that just want to they want to fuck you up. And you've got to figure that out.
01:11:50
Speaker
and figure out how to work around it. But if you can, and you can do that, man, it's really worth the effort. It makes for some really cool molt. Awesome. So assuming that people can get their hands on something to molt, they have a stab at it. I think from here on in, let's talk super generic. We're not going to worry about specific equipment or anything like that.
01:12:12
Speaker
No, no specific malt, because let's fight it at this at this point in time, if someone's got to this point in time, we've got no idea what they've got their hands on. And they're not going to be able to talk specific. So we'll talk, we can talk specifics in terms of equipment, but not so much on the
01:12:27
Speaker
the, uh, the analysis of the actual seed they've got. Cause God knows what they got their hands on. No. Yeah. Um, I think the next thing is equipment, right? Like what do people actually need at home to be able to do what? Like a five, 10 pounds, you know, somewhere or maybe 20 pounds batch of malt somewhere between, you know, two and 10 kilos, I guess. Yeah. So if you want to break it down to its most fundamental basic level, uh, you need a bucket.
01:12:55
Speaker
Yep. And I think, you know, a good way to do this is maybe do two buckets. And in, in the first bucket, which is going to hold your grain, I would just take a drill, a small drill bit, like a really small drill bit so that grain can't fall through that and just just puncture the bottom of that bucket with just a shit ton of holes. And
01:13:25
Speaker
put that inside the other bucket, and then that's basically your steep vessel. And so when you're done steeping, all you have to do is lift that one bucket out, and it's going to drain. And then when you're ready to go back again and go back into steeps, you can just, I mean, obviously empty that water out. Because here's the thing, a couple of things are going to happen.
01:13:49
Speaker
that when you go into steep, you're cleaning the grain, you're getting all of the excess like all this shit that doesn't need to be there, you're getting rid of all of that. So that's all going to be left behind in that water. So you want to start off with clean water every time. Yeah. And
01:14:06
Speaker
you're going to want like maybe, you know, the thing I keep thinking about is like a screen on a window. That's excellent, because there's plenty of room for airflow. And carbon dioxide, once your grain starts waking up, it's going to start throwing off carbon dioxide. And you want to get rid of that carbon dioxide, because that Brian, you need a flow. Yep. And then
01:14:31
Speaker
In a perfect world, you would be able to put that grain into a humid environment in order to not let it dry out so much, but still give it enough air so that it can't breathe and you don't have to worry about it going acidic and going bad.
01:14:49
Speaker
Okay, actually, while we're going through this, let's talk, you know, how people would actually do it. So let's say you've got your buck, you're basically creating a false bottom, right? You want a big ass colander that's going to hold the grain, but let water through. If people have, I would imagine something like a grain father or a
01:15:09
Speaker
robo-brew or any of the stainless steel brew in a bag type setups would work great for that, right? You fill the, fill the metal mesh up or even a brew in a bag bag, right? Just something to hold grain. And this is a good point. If you're doing this at home, if you're brewing or distilling at home anyway, I mean, the odds are you already have the equipment that you need to malt, you just need to repurpose it.
01:15:31
Speaker
you know, the bottom line is you need something to soak the grain in. You need something to let it dry in that's got good airflow, but doesn't let make the grain go everywhere. And you need something to lay it out on in order to to control the germination process. That's that's really it. And, and you're going to want to
01:15:54
Speaker
You're going to want to control the process to the greatest extent that you can. Understanding that if you're doing it at home, it's a completely different story. You can try, but you're not really. Yeah. I mean, and from personal experience as well, I can tell you, you're going to fuck up a lot of batches.
01:16:15
Speaker
But if you're distilling, here's the other thing though. And actually I talk about this with one of the guys, Steven Osborne from Stout Ridge in New York State.
01:16:28
Speaker
And I've seen this myself as well because I've had four ton batches of malt get a little bit on the acidic side. There is definitely a place for that. And that's the cool thing about malt, even if you fuck it up, it doesn't mean you can't use it.
01:16:47
Speaker
Yeah, call it something different. And in some cases, it's really cool. Like, like, like lactic, like a really lactic fermentation. Man, that makes for some awesome malt whiskey. You got all sorts of things to put into esterification and go crazy. Yeah. All right, man. So we've got a vessel, we've got our grain. We're gonna get it wet.
01:17:14
Speaker
And obviously there's a thousand different things that you as a professional monster will be looking at to decide when to stop getting it wet. But would you suggest to sort of put it into a couple of sentences for people that don't have all that background, would you suggest a period of time to soak it for or something specific to look for to decide when to pull it from that first soak? So the best method that you have in order to do this
01:17:42
Speaker
is to weigh a hunt, count out 100 dry kernels of barley before you steep them and weigh them.
01:17:52
Speaker
Yep, I get an average weight. Yep. And then, and then throughout the process, you have to, and this is, here's the thing, if you're getting a feed barley, just assume that you're going to have really high protein content. So you're going to need to be in steeps and errors for a longer period of time. So, you know, I would, I would put my first steep in anywhere between 10 and 12 hours, which is, which I know a long time, and then go into error rest
01:18:20
Speaker
eight to 10 hours. I mean, a really long first air rest is going to really make that grain thirsty for when you go into your second and steep, but so you put it in for 10 to 12 hours in the water. Yup. And then we jack it up and let it drain for 10 to 12 hours.
01:18:36
Speaker
Yeah. And still, but still do it in a way where you can, uh, you can give it plenty of oxygen. Okay. You can move it around or like, so like, have it like a bag would be good for that, right? You can sort of gently. Exactly. Again.
01:18:52
Speaker
Yep. And the main thing is, though, you got to remember, even when you come out of your first steep, you're going to be generating carbon dioxide. So in that carbon dioxide, obviously, since it's heavier than air, it's going to want to fall down. So the stuff that's at the bottom of that grain bed is going to have the hardest time in respiration. So you want to try to control that process as much as you can so that all that grain has the same access to oxygen throughout the process.
01:19:17
Speaker
So whatever, whatever system you've got, that's going to mean something different. But basically, that's what you need to do. And then what you want to do as well is, first of all,
01:19:30
Speaker
after. So when you come out of steep, that burst steep, you're going to want to figure out, okay, what's my moisture content now. So you're going to count out another 100 kernels, make sure you dry them off so that you're not just because you want to you want to measure bound moisture, not free moisture. So you want to dry out the outside. Yeah, and a good a good kitchen, like a high higher precision kitchen scale is going to give you the best results. But you want to weigh those 100 kernels out and then compare them.
01:20:02
Speaker
the weight of the wet kernels to the weight of the dry kernels, because that's going to tell you one to one, OK, here's how much higher moisture content is in there.
01:20:11
Speaker
Yeah. And what number are you looking for there? So you're going to coming out of the first steep, you're going to want to be at about 25% moisture content. Okay. So let's say that let's make the math easy and pick a number that makes absolutely no sense. What you're saying is if one, if your weight of those kennels was a hundred grams to start with, you now want 125. Exactly. And, and
01:20:37
Speaker
from that point on, coming out of that first steep, when you do that, that's going to give you the clear syndication of the path forward from that point. Okay, so if that number was low, when you first pulled it out, would you just say screw it and go in again? No.
01:20:53
Speaker
No, because once you put it out of the water, you just keep it out of the water. Keep it out of the water for a little while. Let it dry out a little bit. Because the other thing, too, is there's there's there's no risk in taking it out too soon. But well, there's less risk taking it out too soon than there is in keeping it in too long. Okay, because you can drown the grain and kill it. But if you take it out too soon,
01:21:19
Speaker
It's no big deal because it was dry to begin with. And we've got another steep coming up. Exactly. Anyway, let it dry down. Let it dry down and make sure that it still smells good. Here's the other thing too. When you're going through the steep arrest and germination process, you're looking for a specific odor and that is cucumber.
01:21:44
Speaker
Okay. Once you get a strong odor, that means first, that means two things. First of all, respiration is happening because what you're smelling is the carbon dioxide that the drink is giving off. And that means that it's it's happy and it's doing its right thing. But it also means if it smells like clean cucumber,
01:22:03
Speaker
you don't want sourness. So if you're smelling that in cucumber, it means that the grain is healthy, that you don't have any lactic that's starting to get out of control and you don't have any other variables because once you start smelling that stuff, it can get into a really bad place really quick.
Home Malting Techniques and Tips
01:22:20
Speaker
As long as you're smelling that cucumber, you are in good shape. Just keep doing what you're doing and don't mess with it because the grains doing what you want it to do.
01:22:28
Speaker
It's like a, it always reminds me of alfalfa sprouts, opening a bag of alfalfa sprouts and sticking your nose in it. All right, so we've, we've now dried it out. I'm assuming we're putting it back into the bucket again now, getting it wet again. Yep. And depending, I mean, here's the thing is you have to look, you have to look at where you came out of your first steep at.
01:22:50
Speaker
And then you have to basically use that as a judgment call in terms of how long your next steep needs to be. Now, here's the most critical thing, though. You're going to want to take samples periodically and measure them in order to understand how your your grain hydration is going. And that's going to give you the rate of hydration.
01:23:11
Speaker
And once you have it in for a couple of hours, take a sample, weigh it, figure out how much higher moisture content percentage you've got. And then you are intuitively going to have a better understanding of how long that next steep is going to take. Right. And so what's the goal for the next steep? Like, let's say we just took another reading and now we're at 30% hydration. What are we aiming for here? You want to get through 33%, at least.
01:23:39
Speaker
Okay. For the second steep. The second steep. Now in a perfect world, your grain isn't going to need a third steep and you're going to want to be at between 42 and 44%. Because at that point, you're also going to start taking grain samples and look at
01:23:56
Speaker
chit, you're going to want to get a chit count. And once you get to about 92 to 95% chitting, which means that germination has started, your grain is telling you, I'm ready to germinate, send me to germination. I'm all good. So remind people what the chit is. So the chit is the beginning of the rootlets that are going to develop. And then also, the chit happens on the basal end of the grain of the barley kernel.
01:24:24
Speaker
And so that's where all the magic happens. That's the embryo. So out of the embryo grows the rootlets, out of the bottom of the barley kernel, the rootlets, which obviously become the roots of the plant. And then up the back side, on the dorsal side of that grain is gonna be the acrospire. And figure if this is the base of the grain,
01:24:51
Speaker
And that acrospire, you know, it's going to start really slow and small, but it's going to start doing this. If you're making a malt for an all malt distillate, you're going to want that acrospire to be about here when you send it into Kilman. Okay, cool.
01:25:07
Speaker
Yeah. And so you're going to be looking at, but that all starts with the Chit. So once, once you are at about 92 to 95% Chitting, you're ready to go into germination. And that's basically just controlling the variables and giving a, a, a consistent and, um,
01:25:30
Speaker
more stable environment. Right. And the grain doesn't care. The grain is ready to go now. That's more for you. You want to be able to control that process and you're going to want to keep it low temperature and slow germination because that's going to give you the most modification. That's going to give you the most potential spirit yield in the mash. But it's also going to give you the best ratio of enzyme package and extract.
01:25:58
Speaker
Okay, cool. So we've gone through a second steep and we're measuring the hydration rate while it's steeping. We're not going to steep it for more than 10 hours again, because we don't want to drown it. Or what's the point for the second one where you want to like stop and go, okay, I need to do a third. It's a gut call. Honestly, just got to get the feel for it. And, and there is no hard and fast rule. I mean, you basically, you, the hard and fast rule is you want your grain to be happy.
01:26:26
Speaker
But what that grain needs to be happy is going to vary from grain to grain to grain to grain. So what you're telling us is it's complicated and you can't give me a short answer. You have to practice it and you have to understand what the grain is telling you because the grain will tell you exactly what it needs you to do. You just have to learn how to listen to it and how to interpret what it's telling you into an action plan.
01:26:47
Speaker
Okay. So let's say we've got to greater than 33%, ideally more towards the 40, 45%, 42%, I think you said, wasn't it, um, moisture content. And we are getting that 90 plus percent chip rate, which I'm assuming is just literally once again, count out a hundred grains and kernels and count which ones have and have not chitted. Um,
01:27:14
Speaker
So now what do we do? What is the practice and equipment? Think about it in terms of floor malting.
01:27:22
Speaker
So for nothing is a it's a thin layer of barley spread out on the floor. And you want that even, you know, I've I've heard and I've actually I'm not going to say who it is. There is a distiller that I that I worked with. I consulted for this distiller.
01:27:48
Speaker
And he was like, I don't know what's going on. I don't I don't know why I'm having such a problem, but it's like every batch of malt. I think your grain is bad because every batch of malt is just getting rotten and it's going acidic and it and it smells. It smells like a an infected baby took a big shit in.
01:28:10
Speaker
That's a great descriptor. It's like this. These were his words like, well, wait, what are you doing? Because I know based on what he's telling me and what he's saying, it smells like I know what's happening. It's just, I don't understand why it's happening. So like, what are you doing? He's like, well, I'm couching it. Like you're couching it. Why? I mean, couching it is basically, it's just, it's just taking that, that wet grain and throwing it in a big pile.
01:28:36
Speaker
Oh, right. Right. And just letting it heat itself up. And so that's creating all kinds of problems. And it's impossible to control. And the reason why that's terrible, the Scots figured it out centuries ago, which is why.
01:28:57
Speaker
is that you want to be able to control that bed evenly and precisely throughout the entire grain bed. And how you do that is a long, flat, thin bed of grain.
01:29:09
Speaker
That's going to give you the most control over the germination process. Now, if you think about floor malting, what do they do? They go in and they turn it by hand every so often. The reason why they do that is there's three reasons. The first one is they drive off heat because that heat is going to make germination happen faster. And the faster that happens, the less modification you're going to have.
01:29:30
Speaker
Um, the second thing is they drive off carbon dioxide and they give plenty of opportunity for the grain to breathe. And then the third thing is as germination continues, those wrote those rootlets coming out the bottom of the grain, they get longer and longer. And as you get more rootlets, they want to tangle together. Right. Right. Right.
01:29:46
Speaker
And so turning the malt is going to keep those rootlets nice and free and loose, because once those bind up, all the grain that stuff in that clump isn't going to breathe. And that's going to be a potential hazard for the thing going, going rotten. And so practical terms for people doing a smallish, you know, like we said, somewhere between two and ten kilos. I have to imagine you could just use like baking trays or like Tupperware or something.
01:30:15
Speaker
Yeah, and the most important thing is that, first of all, you can control the environment.
01:30:26
Speaker
And what factors are you talking about controlling? I have to imagine we're talking temperature. Mainly temperature, but also humidity, if you can control humidity as well. And that's why like wintertime, no matter where you are, wintertime is a great time to malt because it's really easy to find a place where you can keep it nice and cool. And you can also identify the air and you just go get humidifiers and put them in the room where you're making your malt. And it's always, always easier to warm something up than it is to cool it down, whatever you're doing.
01:30:55
Speaker
At that point, it's already out of control and you got to figure out like a like a big, a big, shallow, long, wide. And I'll go back to the windows. If you can go down to the hardware store and just buy a window screen. That's okay. That's because you want airflow from the bottom 2d. Yeah, because you want to give that carbon dioxide and escape route.
01:31:19
Speaker
Right. Okay. Something to lay it out on. We lay it out, it's gonna start drying off. I'm assuming instantly, because it's no longer in water. Just gonna spray a bottle and just spray it down. Make sure that there's plenty of moisture on there. Because that's the other thing too. Once that grain gets down below 33%, that's where you start getting into germination stopping.
01:31:42
Speaker
And you want to control the process, but you don't want to stop the process unless you're the person controlling it and you're telling the grain when you want it to stop, which is going to happen and kill me. Okay. So you need to spray it down, even down again, and you need to turn it.
01:31:57
Speaker
Uh, obviously practically with the volumes we're doing turnings, not an issue. You can just do it manually as opposed to when you're talking 4,000 kilos or something is a bit different. Um, how often do they want to turn it? Uh, you're going to want to turn it probably, uh, at least every eight hours. Okay. Um, was turning it too much a problem?
01:32:21
Speaker
No, you can't turn it too much, especially on a smaller scale because, and that's part of the part, one of the, one of the, uh, the big benefits to hand turning the malt is that it's easier on the grain. You know, there are new attic systems and all in one systems that have augers and helices in them that turn the malt. And that's all a lot rougher on the, on the malt than just turning it again, because you can control how gentle that is. Um, use your hands or a spatula or whatever.
01:32:51
Speaker
And I'm imagining the biggest thing there is just making sure that you get literally turnover, right? So the stuff that's on the bottom is being moved to the top and it's not, you're not just disrupting it, you actually need to rotate it.
01:33:06
Speaker
Yeah, and again, it depends. It depends on whether or not you're concerned about this stuff on the bottom having access to oxygen. If you are concerned about that, yeah, here's the thing. There's no downside to it at all. And it is in terms of best practices. Yeah, absolutely. You can't go wrong just turning the bed over, especially on a smaller scale. It's not it's not difficult to do actually have here.
01:33:33
Speaker
Oh, nice. I will, when I put this back up for the YouTube side of things, I'll find some of those and overlay them when you're talking about them. Cool. Cool. I'll turn that to you too. Okay, cool. Thanks, man. So how long does this process go for and what are we looking for to say that it's cooked?
01:33:52
Speaker
So, so typically, uh, so germination, you'll be three to four days. Okay. And then once you're fully modified and you're comfortable with where your grain is at, uh, that's where, and it's going to be difficult in a, in a home environment because, you know, our kitchens aren't built with anything that has a fan or a blower in there that can get you to 10,000 CFM.
01:34:15
Speaker
So before we move on to that though, what's the thing that triggers us saying that that process is over? What are we looking for? You are looking for when you look at the, let's do this thing again, when you're looking at the, there we go, the acrospire, you can see over here on this end, that's fully modified because that little white thing,
01:34:41
Speaker
Well, it's a malt wiener. Oh, I don't think we can actually see it, dude. I'll put another one up for you. The contrast is I got you. But anyways, that acrospire, the stem that's coming up the side, when that is between three quarters, the length of the full barley kernel to one or the full length of barley, barley kernel, that's where you're fully modified, assuming that you've been controlling the process really well and that you're getting really well modified malt that started with a very well hydrated kernel.
01:35:11
Speaker
So taking all of those things into account, once your Acrospire gets to between three quarters and the full length of the barley kernel, at least 85, 90% of the samples that you take. Here's the other thing, malting is all about taking samples.
01:35:28
Speaker
Right. You can't guess you have to constantly keep your eye on that grain and see what it's doing in order to understand what you need to do as the malter. So once you you've got enough of those acrospires that are at the right length, then you're going to want to base you're going to want to stop the process. You're going to want to dry it out. Now, in terms of a whole malting, if you're doing it at home, the best thing that you can do is start drying that grain out in germination.
01:35:57
Speaker
Oh, okay. Because even if it drops below, once you get more modified, even if you drop below a particular moisture content and the grain starts to dry out, germination is going to continue. But it's at the end stage anyway, so it's not as important. The more critical
01:36:18
Speaker
time is the very beginning of germination. Once you get into the middle, you're kind of in the nuts and bolts, you're in the guts of it. That's easy. That's fairly easy to control, assuming that you've got an environment where you can control it. But once you get to about majority of your kernels between one half and three quarters, you're going to want to start drying that grain out in order to make kilning shorter.
01:36:43
Speaker
And that's just literally stop spraying it, keep turning it. If you're controlling the humidity, start dropping the humidity a little bit. Yep, exactly. Exactly. And then that way, once you reach the point where the majority of your grain is well modified three quarters to one,
01:37:00
Speaker
and you're ready to stop that process, you're already going to be between I mean, target, you're going to target between 28 and 33 percent moisture content in that grain, which is about 10 percent on the top and 10 percent lower than where you entered germination at. Right. And so at that point, if you're already that low, you can just put it in the oven. OK. And you got to understand, though, once you put it in the oven,
01:37:30
Speaker
until germination stops, that grain's going to be real happy, and it's really going to want to take off. That's why it's also important. That's why it's also important to, to keep an eye on, on what it's doing throughout the initial process as well. So
01:37:54
Speaker
What settings for the oven would you choose? Does it matter what it's in? What vessel it's in? Here's the thing. You want to spread it out. You want that grain bed as thin as you can make it.
01:38:09
Speaker
because the thinner it is, the quicker it's going to dry out because the other side of it is killing happens from the bottom up. So if you've got a thick grain bed, the stuff on the bottom is going to dry out before the stuff on the top, but that moisture is all escaping up. So potentially what you're doing if your grain bed is too deep is you're actually increasing the moisture content of the stuff up here while you're down here. So the thinner you can take it, the quicker that whole bed is going to dry out.
01:38:33
Speaker
So if you've got like three or four layers in your oven, I'd get as many individual like pans, baking pans or whatever, and spread it out as thin as you can on those. And again, here, if you can get something that is either perforated or a screen, your best option, because that's going to give you the quickest and most uniformity in terms of how you're drying it out. Okay, cool. And temperature, what temperature are you going to? I'm assuming that we're going for like a generic base malt sort of thing, I guess.
01:39:03
Speaker
Uh, I, again, I would, I would top it out at 54 C. Okay. And that is, uh, in Fahrenheit. Cause I've got 120 actually. Hold on a second. Convert 54 degrees Celsius into Fahrenheit. The answer is 129.2.
01:39:31
Speaker
I was going to say 125 to 127. But yeah, so about 130 degrees Fahrenheit, you'll be good to go. And what are we looking for in this process to say we're done? And a rough estimation of how long that's going to take, just so people know when to. Well, again, if you started drying it down in germination towards the end of germination, it's going to take a lot less time. You could be 10 hours. You could be 15 minutes.
01:39:59
Speaker
It just depends. Now, here again, you're going to want to take samples and measure them against where you started. You've got to remember, though, that the malting process
01:40:11
Speaker
brings with it, it's called malting loss. And the modification process is going to actually reduce the kernel weight of that grain. It's using energy, right? It's using energy. Exactly. It's got to come from somewhere and it's got to go somewhere. So yeah, exactly. So at that point, I would say you probably would want to be, um,
01:40:40
Speaker
right around you mean you're finished malt from a moisture content perspective you're going to want it between three and a half to five and a half percent moisture and is that is that uh on the on the original weight like the the pre steeped
01:40:57
Speaker
I'd say based on that, and man, this is so difficult to tell because you're basically shooting from the hip the entire time. I'd say a lot of it, honestly, at this point, I would base it more on sensory evaluation. Okay. Yeah. You know, if you chew on that, and you can, you can chew through it really easily and it's very friable, you can break it really easily.
01:41:20
Speaker
call it good. Okay, cool. Because I'm assuming commercially you're using like an AWC, you're doing like a water activity. Yeah, well, I mean, and the other side of it too is, is, you know, looking at it, to your point, looking at the end use of it and the context of why you're doing it in the first place. The biggest impact and the biggest reason why that is important is for storage.
01:41:43
Speaker
If you're not planning on just using it, like, okay, I'm done. I've got my finished malt time to mash it and start making some juice, then you don't have to worry about it. Yeah. As long as you can put it through your, um, as long as you can mill it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Literally just, uh, just eat some. And as long as it, as long as it tastes or as long as it feels and presents like dried barley, not like boiled barley. Yep.
01:42:12
Speaker
then you're, you're good. Well, okay, cool. And what about all the all the stuff that's growing out of the seed? Do we have to deal with that? Rootlets and the acrospires. So in terms of distilling, don't worry about it. You're good. Oh, really? No.
01:42:29
Speaker
Actually, it's actually it's really high protein. So that that would actually be a good thing to include. And just don't even worry about cleaning it. If you were brewing it totally different, totally different thing, you'd basically what you'd want to do is is just knock those off. You'd put them in a like a colander, like a wire colander, like a vegetable strainer, and just like manually rub them around, because that's going to knock all that stuff off. And then you can just filter it off. It'll fall through the screen.
01:42:58
Speaker
So that's the easiest way to clean it. If you're brewing with it, you're making beer. If you're distilling with it, don't even worry about it. Okay. Wow. There you go. I did not know that. Do you think that has any impact on flavor one way or the other for distilling? No, no. And that's because it, it's such a small component of it. Right.
01:43:23
Speaker
And depending on how you're milling it, you know, if you're, if you're just using like a coarse grist, as opposed to a hammer milled flower, your surface area compared to the rest of the stuff is, is really low. So actually I'd be more concerned about husk than I would be about ruelets. Wow. Okay. So that, that pretty much gets us through the whole process now, doesn't it? We missed anything?
01:43:51
Speaker
Uh, no, no. I mean, the, the only other thing is, uh, if, if you're, if you're wanting to play around with flavor and you're looking at different types, I was just what I was going to suggest. Yep. Um, I would, I would pull maybe of all the, all the grain that you just malted, I would maybe pull three quarters, maybe two thirds to three quarters of it out.
01:44:17
Speaker
and just keep the rest going and maybe increase the heat a little bit because at that point, if you're really low color, you've got high enzyme, so you're gonna have plenty of conversion that's gonna be happening.
01:44:33
Speaker
Yep. Yep. Yep. So we are talking that this whole batch is going to be one batch of spirits. So if you've got, let's say you've got 20 kilos or whatever that happens to be 45 pounds or something close to that in the oven.
01:44:50
Speaker
You just pulled out three quarts of it. So you pull out, you know, you maybe leave five kilos in there, two kilos in there, somewhere around that, whatever ratio you want to be. And you saved the stuff that's come out of the oven to do the heavy lifting in terms of diastatic power, which means that we don't now care about the enzyme content of what's left in the oven. Cause we've already got a basis covered on that. So now we can, now we can fuck with flavor, which is cool. So, um, what, what?
01:45:19
Speaker
What would you say in terms of a specialty malt would be the easiest thing for people to, a target to aim for? Are we talking crystal? Are we talking chocolate? Like what, what presents the least problems in doing this in a home oven? Well, first of all, you're not going to be able to make a crystal malt at home. Yeah.
01:45:37
Speaker
Um, but that's okay because, uh, you can actually do, um, I, I would increase your oven temp by maybe even 50%. And, uh, you know, at that point, if you're going for color, maybe target an Amber malt. Okay. Yep. You know, you can do, and, and I know there are different, there are different distilleries who, who have mash bills that, I mean, they'll put chocolate malt in there. They'll, they'll even put like a debittered black.
01:46:08
Speaker
in there. And just because it adds, it all brings something different to the table in terms of flavor profile and complexity. So just play with it. But a good starting point would be sort of a medium killed, maybe 60 lava bond, or 40 to 60, like an amber malt.
01:46:27
Speaker
or something that's got higher color, but still has a nice, rich flavor to it. Maybe something like biscuity or grape nuts, something like that. It's got a good cereal kind of flavor to it. And I have to imagine that aiming for something in that real sort of middle ground territory for a specialty malt means that you can miss it one way or the other.
01:46:55
Speaker
And you may not have what you started with, but it's still going to taste good when you distill it. Yeah. Well, aiming to go something really dark and you screw it up by 20 minutes in the oven, you might have just ruined it. Let's just call the whole craft movement what it is, right? It's a happy accident.
01:47:13
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's really it. And I'll go ahead and like personal personal experiences for recently, it's something that happened with us is we were actually at the malt house, we were targeting a C 60. And part of it was just qualifying our kiln and seeing what our kiln can do and playing around with different variables. What actually came out the other side was not a C 60. It was not a caramel malt at all. But it was just really cool, weird, unique malt that had color, it had flavor, but it also had 20 dp.
01:47:42
Speaker
which was just weird. And it's not what we expected. And, and that was a happy accident to the point now where, you know, a week in, we're talking about like, you know, I think we can actually kind of build a whole product line around this thing. Can you make it again? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And part of it, though, part of the reason why we got this is that is that there were some equipment challenges. And
01:48:08
Speaker
there in, you know, as long as your head is in the right spot and you're open to seeing what's going to happen and kind of rolling with the punches with big fuckups come. You know, here's another perfect example. A lot of people don't know, like everybody knows what Gambrena's honey malt is, right? It's a melanoid malt that was developed by Gambrenas. So
01:48:33
Speaker
And people like maltsters have a good general idea of what honey malt is. And obviously they know what a melanoid malt is. But honey malt specifically has its own very unique characteristics. And I was at the Craft Malt Conference, the very first ever Craft Malt Conference, three years ago in Asheville, North Carolina. And I got to know and became friends with a gentleman who came from Cambrianus.
01:49:03
Speaker
And one night, the last night of the conference, we were all out at dinner, kind of our last night sort of capstone celebratory dinner. And we all had three or four beers into us. And so I sat down with him and it seems Rob said, so Rob, honeymalt. And he just started laughing. He's like, yeah, honeymalt. I get that a lot. Like, dude, you, you fucked up a batch, didn't you?
01:49:27
Speaker
said, yep. But see, that's the thing is, is you got to look at it from their perspective, they're running 400 450 500 ton batches, they screw up a batch. That is a huge, huge hit financially. That's a lot of barley. So you just got to figure out like, the other side of it too, is their system wasn't set up to clean out in the case that something does screw up. So if they do screw up a batch, they still have to take it through the entire process.
01:49:54
Speaker
And then just maybe shit can it when they're done. But what he said was, they just, they, they, they picked things up where, where it left off and basically they choke the grain off at a specific point in the process. And it went anaerobic and that anaerobic respiration is what developed that melanoidin content, but it happened at a very
01:50:16
Speaker
back to the process in a very specific way. And then they killed it as they would the malt type that they were going for. And it turned into the Gambrina's honey malt. And that's, that's what they did. Like, let's figure out what we've got here at the end of it and see if we can do anything with it. And they tasted it and they're like, wow.
01:50:34
Speaker
this is fucking good. Like, we can work with this. Hey, can you do that again? Like, sure. You go now you've got Gambrina sunny malt, and that's where that came from. But that's the thing is you have to be you have to go into the process understanding that not everything is going to mean that's malting.
01:50:53
Speaker
Yeah, nothing's going to go the way that you want it to go ever. It's just not going to happen. You just have to understand how best to control the variables with what you've got in terms of your tools and your system and how you're malting. You just have to get to know your system. And that will tell you, as long as you understand how to listen to the grain, that will tell you everything you need to know in order to get to your target objective in terms of your malt.
01:51:20
Speaker
So I think it's the same as anything else. I mean, this whole, this whole distilling hobby is just packed with things that are exactly like this, right? That things where all you're doing is trying to wrangle something that can't be wrangled to a point where you can kind of repeat it. You go along for the ride and you make the best of whatever comes out and then you try and figure out how to repeat it. Like fermentation, I think is probably the
01:51:49
Speaker
the ultimate other part of this or barrel aging as well. And at the end of the day, all you can do is take really, really, really good notes. So when you do make a happy accident, you can figure out what the hell you did and try and reproduce it. I think there is something to be said for the argument that the best malsters and the best distillers are those who are the best blenders.
01:52:17
Speaker
Yeah, I can see that because if you can't figure out where that happy accident fits into the final product, you may be missing gold and putting gold down the sink. You can't have any consistency. You've got to understand. Yeah, totally.
01:52:36
Speaker
How to understand going into it that when you come out the other end, you're going to have a different
Legalizing Home Distilling: Pros and Cons
01:52:41
Speaker
product. It's going to be close, but you're never going to have the same product twice in a row. I think it's the same for malting as it is for distilling. But part of the skill and where the science meets the artistry is understanding how to turn that into something that at the end of the day, someone's going to want to pay money for.
01:53:00
Speaker
Yeah, which at a commercial level is, I mean, you can call it selling out or whatever you want. But let's face it, if you run a business, that is what pays the bills and keeps the doors open. That's the thing. You know, you're, you aren't selling to yourself. You know, you're, you're making something that you need to sell to somebody else. And if they don't want it, they're not going to buy it.
01:53:24
Speaker
Yeah, totally. And I mean, it's kind of the same thing at home too, right? If you're creating something that you don't actually want to drink, then why? You're not gonna drink it, you're gonna end up buying something else, or just drinking beer instead, and you're gonna eventually just give up on the hobby. So it's, I think it's important for both. Sorry, back to the specialty malt that's now sitting in the oven. We did it again, dude.
01:53:53
Speaker
Um.
01:53:56
Speaker
So let's just bump up the temperature and now we're at, I'm assuming something like 70, 75 degrees Celsius. Here's the thing. At this point, again, enzyme doesn't matter. Yeah, you're just you're just developing color and flavor. You are controlling the Maillard reaction. So and that's all that matters. And so at that point, it's pure sensory. That's all it is. When it looks good, tastes good.
01:54:23
Speaker
Pull it. Yep, you got it. Exactly. Awesome. So then the things that you can play with obviously are the temperature that you're cooking at, the length of time you're cooking for, the color you get to, and then of course the ratio that you're blending that back into the quote unquote base malt that we just made. So maybe you pulled out 80% of base malt, kept 20% in, maybe next time you try it at 30%.
01:54:51
Speaker
5% and go darker or lighter. So these are just endless experiments at this point, isn't it? It's just, you can go forever.
01:55:00
Speaker
Absolutely. Well, and then and then and then you throw your yeast and into the mix as well. Oh, yeah, everything else downstream This yeah, this is not a hobby where you're ever going to solve the problem there is the even asking the question is distilling a solved problem is just a Ridiculous premise to start with yeah so there's one other thing that I think we should talk about dude and this
01:55:28
Speaker
could either come in before or after kilning or replace kilning. You see where I'm going with this? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there, there are a couple of schools of thought on this and I will tell you that in terms of what you're going to be doing at home,
01:55:53
Speaker
If okay, assuming that home distilling was legal in the United States, which it is, this is what you would do. Here's what I would do. Yeah, I would. Honestly, I wouldn't even kill.
01:56:11
Speaker
Uh, because, because you aren't killing, killing isn't increasing extract potential. The only thing that killing is doing is making your grain storable. That's it in color. If you're going or yeah, exactly. Oh, if you're developing flavor, yeah. Yeah. The mild reaction, but in terms of extract potential and enzyme potential killing isn't doing anything for either of those.
01:56:37
Speaker
Okay. So what I would do is I would take green malt and I would take it actually out of germination early and I would cold smoke. Oh, okay. Right. Um, and I'm cold smoking it because the one thing that you're giving up when you just, when you take it from germination into smoking is temperature control.
01:57:03
Speaker
In terms of anything that anybody is going to be doing at home, the reality is you're giving up your temperature control. So you just have to understand going into it that you're not increasing anything in terms of airflow, probably. And you're also not keeping the temperature low. So just assume that while you're smoking that grain, it's going to go into kind of a hyper modification time.
01:57:30
Speaker
which is which is fine. Here's the other side of it, the longer if you're over modified, the your extract is going to drop, but your enzymes are going to go through the roof. So your D is going to shoot up, which is not a bad thing. The other thing too, is you're not you're not going to have blamed it back, you know? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So so maybe even just take, you know,
01:57:58
Speaker
We're talking about like taking the majority of your base malt out and leaving some of it in the oven to develop color and flavor. Well, maybe on the front end of it, before you even put it in the oven, you take a section of it out and you smoke that.
01:58:13
Speaker
And then you leave the lion's share of it in for kilning to dry it down. And then you take a bunch of that out and then you leave some more in to develop color and flavor via Myard Ranch. And then you cold smoke some of it and just smoke the shit out of it too. Because depending on, well,
01:58:34
Speaker
depending on what you're smoking with. Let's assume that you're smoking with Pete, right? You can put as much Pete as you want into something and I will still ask for more. I have yet to taste something and go, oh, that's too much Pete. It overwhelms everything else. If however you're smoking with wood,
01:58:57
Speaker
I get to that, that point pretty quickly, you know, and it just, it doesn't, it might be, it might be just that Pete is so ingrained in my head is that as part of whiskey and wood smoke is not, and that it's just a personal preference thing. But I, it gets to a point where it just doesn't taste like whiskey to me anymore. So if it's, if it's wood you're smoking with,
01:59:22
Speaker
Yeah, I could, I could say you want to, but the other thing is too, you can make the malt as smoky as you want. And once again, you just use that malt at a lower percentage, right? Right. Yeah, exactly. And just use a lower percentage. And that's just it. It's, it's, if, if you're smoking at home and you're, you're using the malt for, you know, an all malt distillate, you're not going to be smoking the whole batch. You're just going to be smoking a portion of it.
01:59:50
Speaker
So smoke the shit out of it. Because you have to your next batch, maybe you don't have any smoked grain at all. And you just blend it in. You know, I mean, that's it's it's that part of it's really forgiving as well. But what I would do is I would take that green malt out that I want to smoke.
02:00:09
Speaker
And I would just cold smoke it. And how you do that obviously is dependent on on the size of the batch. But one of the things that I've played with at home is I've got the the Breville smoking gun. Yep. Cool. And it works. You just you just and all you have to do is just put your grain in a garbage bag. Mm hmm.
02:00:33
Speaker
And you just press all the air out of it. And you put that Breville smoking gun through the opening and you just let it fill up with smoke.
02:00:43
Speaker
That's all you got to do. And then you leave it in there and let it absorb that. Cause here's the other thing too. Dry grain does not want to absorb smoke. Nothing dry will absorb smoke. It has to be wet. And so even if you're starting with dry grain, you have to spray it down and just get in and spray down because it's the husk at that point, it's the husk that's going to be absorbing the smoke.
02:01:08
Speaker
Yeah. But, but take that green malt. Go ahead. No, no, you're right. I was just going to say you, so you, you would smoke it. And when you say green, you mean it's, it's germinated, but you haven't killed it. You would smoke it like that. And then you can literally just throw it into a mash. Yeah.
02:01:26
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, or even, even, you know, what I might do is just, uh, if you've got thick garbage bags or maybe a couple of layers of garbage bags, just pound it, just grab a book or maybe walk on it, but just kind of increase the surface area, break that grain down a little bit, kind of mushify it a little more smoke uptake. You mean?
02:01:49
Speaker
Yeah. And maybe even when you're done smoking it as well, you could do it when you're done. Just to increase the surface area going into your mash.
02:02:01
Speaker
I would have to imagine, too, that if, because let's face it, none of these processes are predictable. So you can't say, I want to distill, you know, I want to do my mash on this certain Saturday, so I'm going to start molting today, so it'll be ready. It just doesn't work like that. So unless you've got the time and the freedom to just mash when it's ready, you may want to actually dry it out
02:02:27
Speaker
so you can wait for, you know, six days or 10 days until you're free to mash, right? So I would imagine that you could smoke it like that and then pop it back in the oven and kill it, right?
02:02:39
Speaker
here's the other thing you can do. And so it's actually, it's interesting because when I was having the conversation with Rob about the Gambrenas Honeymalt, I was also speaking with him and another gentleman named Hugh, and Hugh is from, he's a Scot, and he's kind of a, he's a big deal in Scotland, on the bald side. And so I sat down with, it was the three of us, and I asked them like, okay, here's the thing, we know,
02:03:08
Speaker
We know that enzymes are not temperature stable at high temperatures, but they are temperature stable at any low temperature. So what if you froze green malt? There you go. Never thought about it. That's exactly what they said. Why have we not been doing this? Yeah, that is a great idea. So
02:03:33
Speaker
smoke, like mash the shit out of your grain, smoke it or smoke it and then mash the shit out of it and then just put it in the freezer. And it's already in a garbage bag. So love it in the freezer. And it's good to go. And then that way you've got any enzyme potential that was there, if there was any there, which you got to assume there still is going to be, um, is going to be intact. It's still going to be fresh and it's going to be usable and it's a lot easier to freeze something than it is to dry it down.
02:04:03
Speaker
Yeah, that's, and honestly at the volumes we're doing, you could do that with your baseball too, couldn't you? Absolutely. Yeah. And then just so then suddenly, I mean, that makes things easier too. Cause the pinch point I'm seeing in all of this in terms of volume is the oven. It's pretty easy for me just to get another six buckets, you know, and now do 40 kilos.
02:04:26
Speaker
Oh, yeah. But trying to get 40, 40 kilos of malt through an oven when it takes, you know, it might take 10 hours to dry it up. I don't have 10 ovens. Yeah, that's exactly that's kind of the point. I mean, we both got to the same point is is once your green malt is done and you're fully modified, if you've got your own freezer like in the garage, just take the majority of that and just dump it in the freezer and you're good to go.
02:04:55
Speaker
Yeah. But if you want to, if you want to then develop some color and flavor out of it, then it's a lot easier than putting the whole batch in the oven. You just put a little bit of it in there and then, and you're not worried about enzymes at that point anyway. So that is really interesting, dude. Hmm. Because the other thing is at that point where you're going into killing, it's quite time sensitive, isn't it? You can't just, you can't just say,
02:05:23
Speaker
You know, I'm going to start kilning in a kiln over the next five days, because by the time you get to day five, the last batch that's going into the oven, it's not just going to stop growing. Right. Yeah. Oh, that's really cool. I like that idea, dude.
02:05:42
Speaker
So just to throw it out there for people that are interested in smoking or creating their own base malt, sorry, specialty malt, you can totally just go to the store, buy some
02:05:55
Speaker
Buy some American pale ale, buy some Pilsner, buy some whatever. And you can start everything we just talked about from that process. So for the kilning for the first specialty malt, do it exactly like we said. If you aren't talking about smoking it though, I did make a video with Ty from Andalusia. They smoke all their own.
02:06:15
Speaker
grain, but essentially, yeah, spritz it down, wet it, get it nice and moist, so there's something for the smoke to bind to. And depending on whether or not you want enzymes or not, either cold smoke, so you're not fucking with the enzymes, or if you're using it as a specialty malt, who cares? You can cook it at the same time if you want to, and then blend it back in. So you don't need to go through this whole process to be able to mess with those things if you want to. Yep, absolutely.
02:06:45
Speaker
Alright, man. I think that about covers that part of things. What do you reckon? Is there anything else you want to add to how you can fuck with this stuff at home? Man, you know, I would say just, I would, I would love to get some feedback from people. Anybody who's trying Malton at home? Who's trying to get home? Because here's the other thing too is, is
02:07:07
Speaker
Necessity is the mother of invention, right? So I would love to hear what other people are doing, what they've had success with on that, and what batch size they're working with as well, because there are a million different variables that could play a role at any given time. And what
02:07:27
Speaker
impacts me may not impact you, but it might well inform something that could happen down the road. And so it's, it's really just being kind of an active member of the community and just being, you know, vocal about what you're experiencing and, and helping other people. So that said, you know, I'd really be interested in hearing what other people's experiences are multi at home. And if I can, if I can be a resource at all as well, I'm happy to do that.
02:07:54
Speaker
Yeah, cool, man. What's the best way for people to get in touch with you? Is it through the podcast website? With that? Yeah, that's the easiest thing, the content, well, the Contact Us page is really the Contact Me page, because I am. It's asmwpodcast.com. Or you can just email Matt at asmwpodcast.com.
02:08:18
Speaker
Cool. I feel like I would be doing the community a disservice if I did not mention Mark over at Silver Fox Distillery in Canada right now because I know he's working on essentially an open source project for creating a set of plans and a
02:08:36
Speaker
I guess a system for molting and he's trying to make a kind of an all-in-one, as I understand it, an all-in-one machine that basically you throw the molten to in the beginning and that acts as the steep, that acts as the germination, that acts as the kiln, and you can smoke in it all in one go.
02:08:56
Speaker
He's got a, he's got a YouTube channel as well. Um, if people are interested in it, and that's the sort of thing that you want to, you know, know what's going on with, make sure you go and check him out and stay up to date with that. Yeah. And that's an important point. You can't, you cannot have too much control. Yeah. Yeah. You know what? No, I'll take it. I'll step it back. You can never have enough control.
02:09:21
Speaker
You can't. So any tool that you can, if there's something that you want to do specific to Malt, you're going to need to have as much control as you possibly can. So it's cool to see that someone's actually working on putting a system together for use at home. That's really cool.
02:09:41
Speaker
Yeah, I think, I think he wants to sort of straddle, straddle the, potentially you could scale it down a little bit and use it at home. Um, but mostly I think for kind of like micro distilleries for people to be able to kind of mess with this stuff on a commercial, but very small. So I'm not familiar with, with, uh, I mean, I've, I've heard a little bit about it, but I'm not familiar with any specifics. You know, like roughly what the batch size is on that. Uh, I think he was aiming for.
02:10:09
Speaker
Was it 200 kilo or 500 kilo? Oh, okay. I'm not, I'm not sure, but it was in the, in the range where it would be kind of meaningful for a micro distillery. Um, it would be a net on the ass of any, you know, sort of distillery that's going through volume, um, and kind of overkill for.
02:10:30
Speaker
for something at home. Still is. Yeah. And saying that to be better than bored put out a pretty cool video making like a little wee robot that's basically like a rotating bucket that
02:10:43
Speaker
sort of went, cause, cause what we talked about was essentially the, the down on dirty, uh, get it done with what you got laying around the house. Right. And he took it a little bit further than that. Um, so you check that video out. Obviously he doesn't have the background in molting. Um, but he's got the background and just messing with things at home. So if anyone's interested, you check that out as well. Cool. All right. So, uh, what the, the plan was today is that I was supposed to go live for the Patreons
02:11:10
Speaker
with the idea being that we're going to have a Q&A session afterwards, single person drop in and look at this. So I wonder if I fucked up the links for the Patreons and I'm going to get off the stream and find a bunch of grumpy people saying they couldn't actually join it. So if that is the case, I apologize profusely Patreons. Um, I am going to try and do this a little bit more because, uh,
02:11:35
Speaker
I feel like it's a nice way to give back to those people that are supporting me. And like you say, have interaction between people like yourselves and the community, which at the end of the day, I think is good for everyone, right? Like it's good for you because it puts you on the spot and makes you actually think about things that maybe you haven't thought in depth about on a different level. And I think one of my greatest passions for this hobby would be to get it legalized in America simply because if you have thousands and thousands of people
02:12:05
Speaker
innovating in their sheds, that bleeds out into the community, into the commercial side of things as well, right? Like you said, craft beer was a happy accident. And the boom came from people that were passionate about it and were just able to mess with it at home. So yeah. Yeah. And, and, you know, I don't know, I,
02:12:31
Speaker
It's with our government here in the States. It's so difficult to say, you know, what it looks like. And, but, but you know, that said back in the seventies, nobody would have told you that we were ever going to legalize home brewing.
Community Engagement and Podcast's Role
02:12:42
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a hard word no matter what, but it, it's not an impossibility.
02:12:48
Speaker
I hope not. I hope not because I know that there is definitely enough interest and there is enough, I think, infrastructure to be able to help support that from a hobbyist perspective that, you know, it's like anything. If you make it taboo, then you're sort of almost developing an environment of uncontrolled and unrestricted potential negative outcomes.
02:13:18
Speaker
you know, but if, if you legalize it and you put some guidelines in place, then I think it's a different story. And so I would love to see that happen because, you know, we're seeing, we're seeing, uh, there just last week, there was, uh, there was something online where someone had a home distillery and it blew up. Yeah. The good old, that, that sombrero of death, you know,
02:13:42
Speaker
And, but that, but that's, that's an exact, you know, that, that's a, that's a perfect analog for what we're talking about. You know, it's just like, it's because this is something that he wanted to do, that he needed to do, but he didn't have the infrastructure and the support in order to do it properly and correctly and safely. Yeah. I mean, he was distilling in the basement.
02:14:05
Speaker
with zero air flow. We've run into a problem already. So yeah, his basement quickly became the top floor. And the bottom floor. Yeah, it's crazy, man. And I mean, literally, I think it was the day or the day after I saw that article pop up in one of the home distilling Facebook groups or forums or whatever, a guy got in touch with me and said,
02:14:35
Speaker
Hey, I'm thinking of doing this. What do you reckon? And my response was that is sketchy as hell because, you know, these things can happen. And it's I imagine if you could walk into any homebrew store in America and openly talk about this stuff and the guy behind the counter could actually actively pursue knowledge and home distilling the same as they can in homebrewing and you could
02:15:03
Speaker
gain insight and more importantly safety knowledge into the hobby that easily and that openly it would just change everything you know yeah i don't know but yeah i know but you know we we very rarely make the right decisions for the right reasons here so
02:15:26
Speaker
All right, man, we've been at this for over two hours. So I think I think we're going to round things up. Get on out of here when we do. I'll double check and see if the patrons are are available and see if we can do a Q&A with you. But once again, do you want to give a shout out for your podcast, the name of the podcast and the website for that?
02:15:44
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So it's, uh, single malt matters, the American single malt whiskey podcast available anywhere you get your podcasts, uh, the website, ASMW podcast.com. And really it's all about just, you know, it's kind of a twofold objective. The first one is just building awareness of what American single malt whiskey is in terms of the people making it. But the other one is just building awareness from a consumer perspective so that people
02:16:10
Speaker
know who to look for, and they know what to ask for when they go into the liquor store. If they're looking for something specific and unique, they have an understanding of what it is because the more of the stuff that we sell, the higher the demand we make, the more we make the business case for actually turning this into its own thing, which desperately needs to happen. So a lot of exciting stuff happening. I've got the next episode that drops is going to be
02:16:40
Speaker
with a Scotsman by the name of Graham Wallace, who is the distillery manager for Boulder Spirits and Vapor Distillery in Boulder, Colorado. Oh man, the juice man is just, it's rock star stuff. It's really good. And then after that, the next one that's going to drop is going to be Mr. Steve Hawley, which is the founder of the American Single Malt Whiskey Commission.
02:17:09
Speaker
And he's also...
02:17:12
Speaker
one of the, one of the higher ups on the marketing side, specifically for Westland Distillery out of Seattle, which is one of the OG American single malt whiskey producers. So I've got some really good content coming up, some really cool stuff. And I'm really excited with the momentum that the podcast has been already building. And dude, you're crushing it. You've got five episodes out and it's not like you had a, a base of something to start from. Like this is your,
02:17:42
Speaker
This is you starting your foray into the side of the community. Obviously, you've got connections for guests and that sort of stuff, but in terms of developing a viewership, you've started from scratch. It's impressive, man. It's super well-produced. Obviously, you can see your history in radio. Unlike this podcast, I am not going to do any editing on this. I'm going to cut the beginning off and the end off after we've been talking shit. Look at you. You've got a set. I don't have a set.
02:18:13
Speaker
Yeah, that's a dream. I mean, shit, I barely have a bathroom. You got your own set. Yeah, you want to see my sit? Perception is reality, my friend. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, and guys, he's not afraid to get into the geekery of any aspect of
02:18:39
Speaker
anything from literally from grain to glass and any part of it. So yeah, I thoroughly recommend it. Anyway, dude, this has taken way too long to make it happen. I am totally on board with making this a regular thing. We have to do it again. We'll figure out something else to talk about next time. Maybe people will have a whole lot of questions that we can make another podcast out of that.
02:19:02
Speaker
Man, I'd love to, you know what, this would, this is actually, this would be a good, so anybody who's talking about molting at home or you want to kind of start playing around with grain on your own at home, do it and screw everything up and then come, I like, but take notes, get plenty of data, take plenty of notes and then come back. Let's do this again and start asking some questions. Yeah. And yeah, and then, and we'll, we'll do a little troubleshooting. That'd be awesome.
02:19:31
Speaker
I think that's a great idea, dude. I'm down. All right. So basically, if you guys want this to happen again and you want that to happen again, what you need to do is go home and try this yourself. As Matt says, get the get the info, get the questions, send the questions through to me. I will save them all up and
02:19:51
Speaker
And when we reach critical mass of enough questions, we can make it happen again. For those of you on podcasts that aren't seeing this, there's a little gremlin sneaking their way into frame in the background. That's my daughter, Skye.
02:20:07
Speaker
with an easy. And so so if there is ever any question as to to my devotion to the category of single malt whiskey, I named my daughter after the island that one of my favorite distilleries is located on. There we go. All right. Thanks a bunch, man. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Yeah, definitely. Let me know any time you want to make this happen. Just give me a shout. We'll do it again. All right. We're out.
02:20:37
Speaker
Thanks for hanging out everyone. I don't know about you, but I am thoroughly appreciating the ability to be able to hang out and talk in depth with people like Matt. People that are in the craft and know what they're doing. People that we can extract knowledge and interest from in a bit of a longer form discussion. I think that's pretty special.
02:20:57
Speaker
So once again guys, the podcast today was brought to you by the Patreons, thank you very much. If you want to find out what Patreon is all about, if you're founding value in the podcast or in the videos, you can jump on over to patreon.com slash stillet. This podcast was also brought to you by the new stillet and chase the craft challenge coins. You can pick yours up today at chasethecraft.com.
02:21:21
Speaker
Alright guys, I'm outta here. Thanks a bunch. Until next time, keep on chasing the craft. See ya.