Our Process
Designed by co-founder Aaron Goss, Carolina Malt House's one-of-a-kind malt house highlights the terroir of our region by souring all malting barley, wheat, and oats from within a 10-mile radius of our facility.
Grain Receiving & Storage
We are the only malt house in the southeast to have a USDA seed-grading lab, truck scales, a grain elevator, and 136,000bu (6.5mil+ pounds) of custom-designed raw grain storage on site.
This infrastructure allows us to work directly with our growers to receive the grain within hours of harvest. Our grain bins are specially designed to retain our barley's high germination rate and give us year-round quality control over our raw ingredients.
Grain Cleaning
Our two-stage cleaning process ensures a plump, consistent kernel size throughout all of our finished malts. Our clipper, almost 100 years old, uses forced air and screens to perform a size-based sort of the grain from our bins. Its wooden construction is more gentle on the grain than newer, steel machines, meaning it's less likely to crack the seed's hull and thus lead to inconsistent water intake.
After the clipper, the grain passes over our gravity table. Much like those used in a large-scale gold mining operation, this machine performs a density-based sort of the grain, further ensuring the consistency of our raw ingredients.
All of our raw grain cleanings (i.e. the grain not used for malting) are sold to livestock farmers in our immediate area. Since 2018, we have sold over 4,000,000 pounds of raw barley cleanings to local farmers.
Steeping
The first stage of the malting process takes place in one of our two steep tanks that were designed and fabricated in-house. Inside these tanks, the cleaned grain is submerged in water pulled from our 800ft deep well until the target moisture for germination is reached.
We test our water regularly and always find that this water, filtered through hundreds of feet of virgin clay and bedrock under land used for nothing but farming throughout recorded history, is pure and as perfect for malting as could be desired.
We irrigate all of our process water back onto our 60 acres of farmland so the organic compounds and nitrogen can enrich our soil, growing grass to feed the cows we keep on site.
Germination & Kilning
After steeping, the hydrated and sprouting grain is transferred into one of our three 20ton Germination-Kilning Vessels (GKV). Designed by co-founder Aaron Goss, each GKV contains 21 different data monitors which take over 3.5mil readings per cycle.
Predictive temperature controls allow for an extremely tight temperature band, giving our head maltster the ability to promote certain enzymes' development during germination.
During kilning, the majority of the moisture is removed from the green malt and the finished malt's flavors and color are developed.
Malt Cleaning & Storage
The finished malt is pneumatically transferred to our two-stage final cleaning process. We remove the rootlets (chit) from the finished malt in a negative pressure environment, essentially "vacuum cleaning" our malt. The result is a dust-free and consistent final product for our customers to enjoy.
After cleaning, the malt is transferred into triple-lined super sacks and stored in our climate-controlled warehouse.
The chit that we remove during this stage has extremely high protein (~28%) and is considered highly desirable for animal feed. We sell all these cleanings to a pig farmer down the road, who feeds them to free-ranged, heritage breed hogs.
