How a craft malting company expands the whisky conversation

Were all other factors equal, most of us when given the choice between buying a loaf of sourdough from our artisanal, local baker or from the national chain grocers would choose artisanal without question. The appeal is quality and flavour of course – the artisanal baker has the agility to modify their craft to varying conditions and experiment with new flavours. But it’s also the other benefits that come along with it: the support of local and small businesses and the social interactions and conversations that are born between farmer and entrepreneur, baker and buyer. Our lives are enriched when we engage with those whose work we depend upon; our forward progression as a society and as an industry is exponentially bolstered when we extend the conversation multilaterally.

This interest in expanding the conversation to include all players in the whisky supply chain, from farmers to maltsters and the grain itself, has been one of the driving forces behind Crafty Maltsters – an artisanal malting company that Bruichladdich partners with to malt our rye.

Crafty Maltsters came about when sixth-generation farmers Dan and Alison Milne, began to look at how they could make the family farm more financially sustainable. With the help of specialists within and outside of the industry, they began to see their farm in new ways. As predominantly cereal growers, they realised that although they provided the key component of the spirits and beer industries, there was little (if any) attention given to the work of barley farmers. 

“Like many others, we often felt like the part of the supply chain with the least influence and the most burden,” says Alison.

By digging deeper, they saw that the story and value of barley growers had become lost in the industrialisation of malting barley – now widely treated as simply a commodity rather than an ingredient that speaks to provenance, heritage, and flavour. And therein lay the solution to their dilemma. 

In 2015 the Milnes began researching craft malting and found that while it was gaining a foothold in the US, no one was doing it in the UK. After much research and many conversations with distilleries, brewers, malting companies, and engineers, they decided to open Crafty Maltsters.

In 2019 they sent their first batch of barley through their new malting equipment. Although they’d spoken to multiple brewers and distillers who were excited to buy artisanal malt, they had no concrete commitments.

“It was pretty much a giant leap of faith,” Alison says. “We knew that the proposition was solid...[but] we literally didn’t have any customers.”

Curious about how the type of barley, the terroir, and farming practices could influence a malt, Alison and Dan established connections with the James Hutton Institute, which was working with heritage grains. 

“For us, it was never just driven by the provenance, because that could just be a fad,” explains Alison. “It was also about the quality and flavour differentiation...a big part of that is varietal choice.”

Barley farmers today are given a recommended list agreed upon by a panel made up of industry representatives from distilling, agronomy, and farming to advise them on which variety of barley to grow. Just as most produce today is grown with an eye towards longevity and its ability to stand up to long shipping distances, the main criteria for the barley on the recommended list are agronomic traits (e.g., drought and disease resistance, ease of harvest, etc.) and yield – both a higher grain yield and a higher spirit yield from that grain. Flavour, sadly, has nothing to do with the selection.

“There were a lot of people in the whisky industry at that point that were saying ‘it doesn't make any difference. The barley isn’t going to impact the flavour – it’s the cask,’” Alison tells me.

Since Dan and Alison were the growers and the maltsters, their view was that as long as they had a buyer, they could experiment with different varieties. Working with the James Hutton Institute, they began trialling heritage barley – including two Scottish landraces (indigenous varieties) that are no longer grown and two types of Bere barley – one still grown on the Western Isles and one grown in Orkney.

These indigenous varieties are incredibly resilient, having had hundreds of years to adapt to the poor growing conditions of the Highlands and Islands, but those same traits also bring challenges. The first that the Milnes faced was that their soil was, in fact, too good, for the Bere barley – a variety that’s adapted to mineral-deficient soils. The other was the structure itself. These types of barley grow significantly taller than modern varieties, and easily fall over in wet and windy weather. The long awns (bristle-like appendages at the tips of the stalk) tend to bind together and clog up the combine. This and the harder husks make the malting process another game entirely. Emptying the drum, for example, takes seven hours with a heritage grain, rather than one hour with a modern grain.

“You have to change your whole mentality when you’re working with it,” says Alison. “Now everything is so simplified, but the heritage stuff is like ‘Nah. You work with me or not at all.’ You wait and just be a bit more patient. It definitely needs a whole different way of thinking, malting, farming.” 

That’s a lot of work and a lot of extra time – something hard to come by on a 750-acre farm run by two people and a part-time employee. Especially if common industry thinking is true: that barley varietal doesn’t have any influence on the whisky’s flavour.

But what do the customers of Crafty Maltsters have to say about it?

“Anyone that’s worked with the heritage stuff has said ‘totally different – completely different’,” Alison tells me.

In some ways, it seems obvious that the quality and flavour of a spirit would be a result of its primary component. What is perhaps not so obvious is the influence of the farmers and maltsters on the final product. Where the vast majority of malting grain is grown conventionally, and the malting process done by large, industrial companies – both of which depend on fairly strict schedules that don’t allow for nuanced care for each field or batch – smaller farms and craft maltsters have the ability to listen throughout the process and make adjustments as needed.

A commodity maltster will have many hundreds of tons going through in batches and are stuck to a malting schedule. Crafty Maltsters, on the other hand, can make changes during the process, such as giving the grain more or less time for germination or kilning as each batch requires.

“It’s very sensory...much more intuitive. It’s really not that much different from growing it in the field. You’re just controlling the environment...it’s air, it’s water, it’s heat...

“You go into the malting chamber during certain stages, and you can smell instantly if it’s fresh or if something’s not quite right. In terms of working out the modification, Dan will literally rub it in his fingers, and he can tell when it’s done.”

The benefit to their customers of this artisan approach is apparent in the greater yields they get from the malt. The increase in alcohol extract is due in part to the consistency of the barley. By using only their own barley rather than mixing it with grains from multiple farms, they know the kernels will all behave in the same way. This, coupled with the fact that they have greater control of the malting process because of the small batch system, means greater extraction of sugars.

“As far as the quality of the product, our customers will say they get at least 10% more extract from our malt.” 

The intensity of the challenges and the amount of work the Milnes have invested in their craft malting business as well as growing and malting heritage grains, is something not many would be willing to take on. Indeed, they are one of the only craft maltsters in the UK. For Alison, the value has been in proving the worth of the farmer and the barley, raising questions, and seeing how the conversation has changed these last years.

“One hundred per cent it’s the right way to do it,” she proclaims.

Crafty Maltsters has worked with 8 distilleries and 20-25 breweries over the years. For the most part, they use the grain they grow themselves. Bruichladdich Distillery is one exception: the rye they malt for us is grown on Islay as part of our Regeneration Project. The project was borne from a conversation between the distillery and barley farmer Andrew Jones as a small batch experiment to lower the input into the soil at Coull Farm. These pioneering trials champion regenerative agriculture and support soil health. It also results in a delicious whisky.

The Milnes are but one example of how businesses can be used as a tool to drive conversations around any number of themes that impact us all: craft, science, sustainability, diversity, inclusivity, family, and farming. For our part at Bruichladdich Distillery, we aim to use whisky as a vehicle to explore these questions and expand the notions of what is possible.