Malt and Barley: “the terroir of Empire”
By F. Josephine Arrowood
Sun contributor
It’s a glorious autumn day at the Empire Malting Company farm. The century-old red barn, clad in modern aluminum, features hand-hewn posts and beams that shelter ancient agricultural practices adapted to the 21st century. The spring barley harvested months ago is undergoing malting—a process of soaking seeds into germination, then drying, and kilning—before being packed and sent to discerning breweries and distilleries in Northern Michigan and beyond.
Zack Stanz, 31, is a third generation Burdickville native. His mother’s family includes the Breys and the Johnsons, whose Case tractor dealership in Empire was a longtime staple of county farming into the 1970s. Zack focuses on the family excavation and landscape business, and he co-owns the Empire Orchards Hops Farm on M-72 (see our story in June 2009).
Alison Babb, 32, grew up in Gainesville and earned a degree in agricultural management from the University of Florida. She credits her high school and college career as a runner as preparation for a farming career, developing physical stamina as well as realizing that she is better suited to an active outdoor life, rather than sitting at a desk. In 2013, she and Zack established the Empire Malting Company, and she oversees every aspect of its operation.
The first three years, they grew 60-120 acres of “amazing” barley before expanding operations to include malting. The work is labor intensive, often solitary, and vulnerable to trends of culture, as well as climate.
“In the immediate 15-mile area around here, we’ll have 200-300 acres going, and half will be barley. We do grow it every year, and rotate with crops like sorghum. We have great neighbors and friends that we work with, other farms we share equipment with.
“It’s always a challenge to make sure you have enough barley coming in[to the malting process], but this year has been one of the most challenging. We buy barley from other growers—I want to be accurate about that—and we also grew our own. It’s beautiful barley, but we just didn’t have the yields this year that we’ve seen in the past. That’s weather and the nature of farming.”
Like most who work the land, she takes the long view. “So we’re getting better and stronger, and it’s good to build relationships with other farms, support the community.” This cooperative spirit is an integral part of Alison and Zack’s vision for their businesses’ sustainability.
“We’re growing winter and spring varieties. Winter barley is planted in the fall, similar to rye, and ripens a little earlier. There’s a trial plot that the university [MSU Extension] is doing to test different varieties; which varieties can live through the winter here and our cold temperatures. We’ve had a lot of success with spring barleys; that’s our mainstay. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as ‘heritage’ barley any more. They’ve been bred so many times over the years with different varieties. There’s land-race studies to try to determine which species have roots in certain locales, where the dominant, most healthy seeds outcompete the others,” she explains.
In the United States, just seven percent of farmers are women, operating fourteen percent of land; of these, only ten percent farm grains and oil seed crops, according to the 2012 USDA Census of Agriculture. Like most farmers, Alison must wear many hats; farmer, researcher, and marketer are just a few. An accomplished artist, she designed the logo and other graphics for the company. She also picked up welding as a skill when she needed custom hoppers, trays, and drying kilns for the grain.
A self-taught maltster, she says, “I traveled around Canada, worked with experts, picked up every book I could find—technical, historical, new. A lot of trial and error, for years, went into figuring out how we would actually make the malt. But you still have to adapt to local grains and climate. There’s always tweaks we do to make sure everything’s coming out right.
“There’s a lot of debate about where the flavor comes from when you’re making a malt. Does it come from the barley or the malt house? There’s no actual right answer, but there are certainly some very opinionated positions. I think there’s a little bit of both. We’re small-batch, so we’re very heavy on the art side of malting. It’s a combination of art and science, so we like to embrace the artfulness of it, with flexibility and careful intention,” she says.
“All steps in the process are a series of judgment calls by the maltster. Malting is elemental: we’re using air, water, temperature, and time to develop natural flavors and color compounds in the grains. So you’re using these elements, figuring out what combinations bring out different colors and flavors.”
She says, “The real story, I think, is how we are small batch. Terroir is a very important concept. It describes soils, sun, land, water characteristics—literally, the home field advantage of a particular malting house. The air here is phenomenal, probably the most driving factor for why I wanted to do this here, in Empire. This air and water, this climate is so delicious, so this would be a great place to work with barley.
“With the malting, we do make Empire Malt really about the terroir of Empire. We start by cleaning the grain, with this vintage machine of hardwood and iron. I like the concept of a mechanical malt house, instead of completely automated.”
A look into one room in the red barn shows a giant steel soaking vat that Alison created with advice from neighboring cherry farmers. “The grain is soaked for 48 hours. Essentially I look at checkpoints: bubbling the water to keep it oxygenated, enough water to germinate in the next stage. You also want to make sure your water is so delicious; the barley’s taking on almost 50 percent water, so that has a big effect on its flavor.”
In the sprouting room, augurs rotate the grains on large, flat trays called Saladins. The idea of small-batch malting is a relative term. “We do six-ton batches. We start with about seven-and-a-half-ton batches, but it loses quite a bit of weight, so we’ll end up with six tons of finished malt.” This is in contrast to industrial-scale malting that processes 30 tons or more at a time, mostly by automation.
She holds up a kernel. “These are the little rootlets emerging. You’re converting carbohydrates and starch, increasing the sugar. There’s a lot of biology behind it. We take all kinds of measurements; we’re not entirely sensory. It’s a responsibility to make sure your product performs. If you take people’s money, you have to make sure you have some quality guarantees. We get great customer feedback, and we’re very attentive. That’s really what small batch should be.”
The room has a heady aroma of CO2, brought about by the respiration of the grain. Until last April, Alison was hand shoveling and stirring for about four hours a day. “I had a hard time keeping help, getting enough air, or even taking on enough calories. It was very tiring! It was critical to overcome this part.”
The grain is dried and finished next, and here is where her maltster’s skills really come into play. “The driving message with malt is that color and flavor correlate; everything is connected in the grains. A skilled or very competent brewer—and we have so many in Michigan—can crunch it and tell if the finished malt is of high quality.”
Even with some automation in place, she has plenty of heavy lifting to do. Her wiry frame and rock hard muscles reflect the labor intensity associated with malting. “The packaging is also very laborious, filling 50-pound bags continuously. It’s certainly not a business for the weak of heart. But it’s fulfilling in a strange way. You have to be a unique person to enjoy it truly, but I really do.”
Hops, with their dramatic vining habit—up to 30 feet on poles and wires—have received a lot of attention in the past dozen years in Leelanau County. But their contribution to beer making is surprisingly small and relatively recent (think seasoning; think 16th century Europe), compared to beer’s foundational ingredient, malted barley.
“Malting is so historical, an industry over 10,000 years old, while brewing has been going on for 30,000 years,” Alison says. Without the process of malting, barley cannot create the fermentation so necessary to the brewer’s art.
“You build your beer recipe around your malt, in fact; it’s considered the heart, or the meat on the plate, while hops are like the seasoning or spice. Your taste and your malt are the drivers of what your beer outcome is. There was a time when beer was brewed with gruits, or herbs, to add the bittering agent, while hops is more recent. The more I work with malts, the more I see what we can do, and the more interest I have in making new flavors, taking new directions.
“It’s an exciting time for malt as people have started to take notice. Once you start to pay attention to the malt, it helps you understand beer styles more. It adds deeper layers to local beverages and the farming that’s happening, and small businesses working together.
“It’s very clear that craft beer is a conversational thing; it’s a way that people can have time talking together in communities. It’s really cool to see malt finally being a part of it.”
