Brewer John Mallett and Maltster Andrea Stanley – BeerSmith Podcast #135

John Mallet, Director of Operations at Bell’s Brewery and Andrea Stanley from Valley Malting join me to have a discussion about craft malt houses, malt and how small malt and hop houses are changing the face of craft beer.

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Topics in This Week’s Episode (55:49)

Today my guests are John Mallett, Director of Operations at Bell’s Brewery and Andrea Stanley who runs a small malt house named Valley Malting in western Massachusetts. We discuss the emerging field of Craft Malting, a bit of malt history and how craft malting and other small ingredient growers are changing the malt and craft beer industries.
John talks about how his collaboration between big brewer and small malt house owner Andrea Stanley started.
Andrea and John both share some of their thoughts on the rich history of malting including many varieties and techniques that were largely lost.
Andrea talks about the resurgence of small malt houses (aka Craft Malting). In fact when we had her on last in podcast #59 she had started the only small malt house east of the Missisippi.
John discusses how local growing conditions as well as local barley varieties make the malt these small malrsters are making unique.
Andrea in fact sources most of her barley locally in addition to growing some unique varieties on her own land.
John and I discuss our brewing retreat in Colorado and how John made heavy use of sensory analysis when designing recipes there. We talk about malt and hop sensory analysis which has taken on an increasing role in brewing recently.
Andrea introduces a new ASBC method for doing sensory analysis of malts which involves making a hop tea at 65 C and then filtering the result through a coffee filter to get a tea more representative of the malt flavor in beer.
John runs a very large brewing operation at Bell’s and talks about some of the advantages even a large Craft Brewer gets from interacting with craft malt houses.
Andrea shares her experience working closely with breweries and how that drives her entire malting business.
John talks about some of the beers he produced together with Andrea and how it has driven his beer brewing.
We also discuss the emergence of small craft hop growers again – including in areas like Michigan, New York and New England.
Andrea and John share some of the new projects they are working on as well as their closing thoughts.
You can sign up for Andrea’s Farmer Brewer Winter Weekend (mentioned at end of the show) here.

And here is a picture of our guests dressed up in Williamsburg (mentioned in the show):

John and Andrea in their Colonial outfits (mentioned in the show) are featured above.

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