Craft Malting with Jeff Bloem – BeerSmith Podcast #348

Jeff Bloem joins me from Murphy and Rude Malting in Virginia to discuss challenges his business has had producing craft malt, his new partnership with Carolina malts and his craft malt offerings.

Subscribe on iTunes to Audio version or Video version or Spotify or Google Music

Download the MP3 File– Right Click and Save As to download this mp3 file.

Topics in This Week’s Episode (39:25)

This week I welcome back Jeff Bloem. Jeff is the founder and head malster at Murphy & Rude Malting in Charlottesville, VA. Opening in 2018, they are Virginia’s first dedicated commercial specialty malt house producing a wide variety of base, high kiln and specialty malts for brewers and distillers. He has partnered up with Carolina Malt House to produce a number of joint malts.
Jeff ran into a series of difficult challenges with his malting business this Spring. He explains how a production move, and bad batch of malt created unsolvable problems for his business.
We also discuss how he partnered at the last minute with Carolina malting to rescue the business and Jeff tells us how his production partnership works.
Jeff tells us about his partnership with Carolina malt in detail.
I ask about the Craft Beer industry which is under a lot of pressure to cut costs, but he says Craft malting is still doing well.
We talk about the strong business case for locally and artisanal brewing ingredients and Jeff tells us about what these ingredients bring to beer.
Jeff talks about his current production lineup of Craft malts as well as the malt Carolina Malting has brought to the partnership.
We discuss his “GrainStore” shop which is temporarily offline. Jeff is hoping to reopen it shortly if he can find the right partner.
Jeff tells us where you can buy Murphy and Rude and also Carolina malts.
He shares his closing thoughts.