Jesse Kaiss and Danny Buswell from Dark Cloud Malt House join me this week to discuss their experiences starting up a small local malt house. Jesse and Danny are malting their own barley and selling it locally in central Maryland.
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Topics in This Week’s Episode (58:42)
- Today my guests are Jesse Kaiss and Danny Buswell from Dark Cloud Malthouse. Jesse and Danny have started their own very small malting house in central Maryland with a focus on selling to local breweries and distilleries.
- Jesse explains how they both got started trying to build their own malt house.
- Danny tells us some of the research involved including developing a plan.
- We discuss where they set up the malt house and how they funded it.
- Danny explains the challenges of finding locally grown barley as very little brewing barley is grown on the East Coast.
- Jesse walks us through the basic malting process and how you turn raw barley into malt.
- We discuss pneumatic malting, floor malting and turning the grains by hand.
- Jesse tells us about how they dry out the grains after malting (commonly called kilning)
- Danny shares the types of malt they created last season.
- We discuss quantifying the quality of the finished malt as well as how the malts were received by local breweries.
- Jesse explains their plans to expand production next year.
- Danny shares some of the challenges they have faced in growing and scaling the business.
- Jesse tells us about long term plans to grow their own barley to truly have a locally grown/produced malt.
- We discuss future plans and closing thoughts.
Sponsors
- Thank you to our sponsor Craft Beer and Brewing Magazine for sponsoring this episode. I encourage you to subscribe to their great magazine!
- And also Anvil Brewing Equipment. Anvil is a new line of kettles, burners and accessories from John Blichmann at Blichmann Engineering. They make top quality brewing equipment built to last a lifetime.
- Also check out BeerSmith, BeerSmith Mobile software and the new DVDs John Palmer and I filmed – How to Brew with Malt Extract and How to Brew All Grain are available now. You can subscribe to the BeerSmith newsletter for free to get some great articles on home brewing.
Thanks to Jesse Kaiss and Danny Buswell for appearing on the show and also to you for listening!
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