In San Francisco Bay, between the City and the Oakland Waterfront, is the island of Alameda. The north end of the island—once a Naval Air Station—is now home to “Spirits Alley” and a dozen alcoholic-beverage manufacturers. One taproom stands out, however—and not just from its neighbors on the island, but as one of the most unique places I’ve ever tasted a beer.
Instead of showcasing a single brewery’s offerings, the Rake offers 20-plus taps from breweries across California. As the tasting room for Admiral Maltings—the state’s largest craft-malting facility—all its taps feature beers brewed with the California-grown, floor-malted grains in which Admiral specializes. There’s a refreshing diversity of styles on the board, which lists each beer name beside the type of Admiral malt used in the brew. For example, you can see there’s Gallagher’s Best pale ale malt in East Brother’s Russian Imperial Stout, or Pils and Victor in The Pivot, Pond Farm’s West Coast pale ale. Here at the Rake, all styles—even hop-forward ones—are appreciated for their malt character.
The variety of offerings isn’t the only thing that differentiates the Rake from your average tasting room. While a well-designed aesthetic is as common these days as the bare-bones, industrial brewery tap, Admiral is, dare I say, a whole other vibe. Occupying the corner of a massive building—built in 1944 for dry-goods storage—the Rake leans into the utilitarian wartime architecture of the edifice, with exposed steel, subway tile, and draftsman’s stools. It feels like a room where work gets done.
Hoping to get some of my own work done before my malthouse tour and meeting with Admiral cofounder Ron Silberstein, I arrive early and choose a table at the back of the seating area, beneath tall windows that look into the production space. My understanding of the malting process is purely academic, and I’m at Admiral to see barley’s transformation for myself. And there it is: thousands of square feet of barley germinating on the specialized maltings floors—a tennis court–sized golden carpet that will, in a few days, be transmuted into about 240 55-pound sacks of malt.
I can’t take my eyes off it, and soon a worker in waders trudges out to the middle of the field of germinating kernels. He begins pulling behind him an electric malt turner—an awkward-looking metal contraption with spinning tines for turning and untangling the malting barley. It looks arduous. Imagining the maltster’s thirst, I quench my own with the last gulps of pilsner just as Silberstein arrives with a big smile and a bounce in his step, wearing a T-shirt from the decorated Colorado craft maltster Root Shoot.
I’d been following Admiral’s rise since I heard about their first batch of floor-malted barley in the summer of 2017. Silberstein’s excitement to guide me on a tour through barley’s journey from seeds to sacks of malt matches—if not exceeds—my own. That’s how the attorney-turned-brewer-then-maltster is: passionate about the process and eager to talk—at length, depth, and breadth. Not just about the craft of malting grain, but also about the greater agricultural issues facing the farmers without whom there’d be no barley to malt nor beer to brew.
From the Farm to the Steep
“Usually, barley comes in on a hopper truck,” Silberstein says. From there it’s loaded into one of the two malthouse silos, one each for the Butta 12 and Organic Copeland Barley varieties. “Today is rye, I think.”
We walk around to the loading area in back, where the Admiral crew is processing one-ton (907-kilo) super-sacks of rye from Adams Grain, about 80 miles northeast of the Bay. Admiral sources its grain—mostly barley, but also rye, wheat, and corn—from California farmers in the northern half of the state. Admiral works closely with all those farmers to determine which varieties of barley to plant and to ensure the use of sustainable farming practices.
On the forklift, lead maltster Tim Decker lifts the last sack of the day. He positions it over a steel hopper that feeds a Chain-Vey disc conveyor, which pulls the grain along to the steeping tank inside. As millions of rye kernels pour from the super-sack, Silberstein grabs a handful from the hopper, and he points out some small black seeds, lentils, and other chaff interspersed among all the ruddy rye grains.
“All the debris will float to the top while the grain steeps and gets cleaned out,” he says, tossing the sample of rye back into the hopper. It takes just a few minutes for the 2,000 pounds of grain to pour from the super-sack, and a few minutes more for the Chain-Vey to churn through it.
Next stop: the steeping tank, where the other 8,000 pounds of rye are just getting settled.
“Tina” the malt turner; grain in a steeping vat
Hydration Triggers Transformation
The barleycorn is a wondrous biological apparatus—what John Mallet called a “tiny factory” in his book Malt: A Practical Guide from Field to Brewhouse. The kernel’s biomechanics turn raw materials—starch granules—into a new barley plant. But before the would-be plant consumes all that energy, the maltster halts germination, creating a stable source of fermentables, enzymes, and other elements that brewers and yeast love.
“Breaking down protein is our number one job,” Silberstein says. Once the kernel is well hydrated, germination can begin. Over a couple of days and a few changes of water, up to 10,000 pounds of grain steeps in tanks at the center of the production area. The process includes regular aeration and the cleaning-out of foreign material. As the barley embryo hydrates, it begins to release hormones that trigger enzymatic reactions, and those reactions modify the starchy endosperm into more accessible sugars.
At Admiral, this step happens on the broad concrete malting floors.
“We like the grain to sleep in a nice bed,” Silberstein says from our vantage point on the steeping tank’s deck. We’re looking out across two spreads of barley malting below us. Each of the malthouse’s original malting floors can handle eight tons of grain, while the larger expansion floor can hold 10 tons.
The smell of the building on this side of the glass is intense and varied. Here, as the rye pours into the tank, it smells grainy and rich, with a zesty floral edge. Back on the ground level, nearer the thousands of pounds of germinating barley, the aroma is grassy and alive.
Out on the Floor
Maltsters fill large-wheeled carts called bobby barrels with several hundred pounds of hydrated kernels, and they roll these loads out onto the malting floor. Germination is exothermic—that is, it produces heat—but the whole system is temperature-sensitive. Too hot, and the malting process stalls. So, once the initial pile of grain has begun to chit—that is, a rootlet becomes visible at one end of the kernel—they use specialized rakes to spread the mass out into a uniform layer a few inches thick. Now the floor, cooled by glycol lines set under the surface, can provide the ideal environment for the continued germination.
That mass of malting grain is called the “piece,” and Silberstein leans down to take a small handful of kernels from the edge. He bites off the end of one and squeezes out a white pellet of starch. He then smears the carbohydrate matrix along his palm with his thumbnail. I do the same. The endosperm is chunky and gritty, and it smells like raw flour.
We walk over to the other eight-ton piece that’s been on the floor for a couple more days, and he repeats the bite-squeeze-smear test. This time, the kernel’s payload spreads easily, and the texture reminds me of a cooked bean. The smell is different, too—fuller, more cereal-like, reminding me of that Grape-Nuts mash-in smell.
The team monitors the malting grains closely, taking temperature readings throughout the days-long germination. The cooled floor keeps the barley between 55 and 65°F (13 and 18°C). Twice every day, they turn the kernels to aerate, cool, and untangle the growing rootlets. While many floor-malting facilities use hand tools for this job—typically, a rake that resembles a small plow—Admiral uses a custom-built, one-of-a-kind electric malt turner that the crew has named “Tina.”
The manual processes and wide floor allow both micro-variations in the germination and exposure to the microbiome present in the incoming crop and in the building. This all leads to greater complexity in the flavor of the finished product—complexity that’s smoothed out by the homogenization at the large-scale malting facilities.
When the first green shoot emerges from the kernel’s end opposite the rootlet, the grain’s floor routine is finished. A series of pulleys and plows pull the modified grain off the malting floor onto conveyor belts, which move the still-moist kernels toward the final major machine in the process: the kiln.
Left: Tools of the malting trade; taps at the Rake feature beer made from Admiral malt
Heat Pauses the Process
Resembling a nondescript semitrailer, the blower-fed kiln can handle 10 tons of malt. It’s loud, and it’s hot, but it gives the operators fine control over the temperature and airflow parameters to not only dry the malt efficiently, but also to produce the various grades of finished product—from pale pils malt to darker Munich and caramel styles. Heat halts the germination, locking in the changes to the proteins and starch in the kernel, and higher heats create a different spectrum of flavors in the grain.
An inclined conveyor belt transports the moist “green malt” from the floor’s collection points to the “slinger”—a belt-fed malt launcher that shoots the malt onto the kiln’s false bottom in an even layer of about 24 inches. Heated air blows up through the grain, and the whole cycle takes about 24 hours. There’s no malt-cannon to unload the kiln, though—all that finished malt is manually shoveled into an auger that carries it into the next room.
The next step is a cleaning machine that shakes and sieves that malt, removing loose husk material, broken kernels, and rootlets—a by-product used by local farmers as feed. The finished malt is then bagged and stacked on pallets.
The process of receiving the grain and shipping out a bag of finished malt can happen in a little more than one week. The maltings labels each bag with its kiln date and with its “best by” date six months out.
Freshness is hard to quantify, but Silberstein says it’s one thing that separates Admiral’s malt from that of larger producers. The biggest malthouses are blending batches across weeks or even months, and sometimes malt will be more than six months old by the time it reaches a brewery. Malt is relatively stable and can be stored longer than that, but Silberstein says that fresh-kilned flavor defines Admiral’s malt. It’s a flavor that carries through to the finished beers.
Fresh is Flavorful
After our tour, Silberstein deposits me back at the Rake, where some of the production crew are at the bar enjoying their “shifties” after a long day.
“It’s a hands-on job,” Decker says. “Not everyone likes it—some people find brewhouse and cellar work easier.”
I ponder the maltster’s toils as I sample a refreshing pint of Oh Black Lager from Discretion Brewing in Soquel, south of the Bay near Santa Cruz. I also think about the 10 tons of barley that need to be steeped and spread onto the largest of the three malting floors, one bobby-barrow load at a time; about the five days it spends germinating, getting turned twice each day by a maltster dragging “Tina” through the entangling roots; about the plowing and raking to clear the floor, and all that shoveling to unload the kiln; about sealing each filled bag with the handheld stitching gun, and about stacking each 55-pound bag on the pallets.
Just thinking about all that work makes me thirsty, and I gulp down the silky schwarzbier pretty quickly.
Maybe it’s my mindset, or maybe it’s my location just feet away from where the malt is made, but that black lager seems to sing—as if cotton has been pulled from my ears, and I can suddenly hear all the subtleties of timbre and tone in the beer’s composition. There is the roasty coffee and chocolate that I expect from any schwarzbier, but there are more layers of dark fruit and toasted bread crust and a burnt honey that linger, pushing back against the snappy hops in the finish.
Sure, I’m paying more attention to the malt flavors—that’s what the Rake asks of you—but the malt flavors are also shouting when I’m more used to a whisper. It’s flavor in high fidelity.
At any number of brewery tasting rooms, you can sit with the people who make the beer you drink. And at any number of beer bars, you can sample from a dizzying array of styles from breweries of all types.
At the Rake, however, you can discover the soul that runs through all those diverse offerings. At the Rake, hops are still sexy, but malt is even sexier. At the Rake, the craftspeople may be one degree further from the finished beer than the brewers are, but they’re also one step closer to the field.
And it’s the farmer’s fields that will define the next phase of craft beer, as the industry confronts a changing climate and a changing marketplace head-on.