There are several reasons why a brewer might want to use wind malt, but let’s say this up front: You don’t have to do it this way.
You don’t need to grow your own barley, and you don’t need to source raw barley from anyone else. You don’t have to spend days steeping and germinating that barley, and you don’t have to spend more days leaving it out to dry in the sun, wind, or attic, all while protecting it from moisture and critters. And you certainly don’t have to make beer with your own homemade wind malt, as if you were one of the mighty ancients or a resourceful farmhouse brewer of yore.
Who do you think you are, anyway?
Clearly, you don’t have to make your own malt at all—people sell that stuff at good prices, you know? The quality is consistently high. But even if you did make your own malt, there are devices in your kitchen—oven, food dehydrator—that can do a better, more predictable job of drying your own malt.
So, now we’ve made the point that wind malt is not exactly a (ahem) breeze, let’s cut to the essence of what it is: It’s malt that has been dried in the air, wind, or sun rather than heated in a kiln. (In some cases, the drying may technically happen in a kiln, but at temperatures low enough that it might as well have been in your backyard in midsummer.)
If all goes well, you end up with a very pale, highly enzymatic malt of relatively low modification. It won’t be all that efficient, compared to modern pale malt, but it will have its own flavor—and you can make beer out of it.
Why bother with wind malt? Here are some possible reasons:
- You’re into history and tradition. Not only was wind-dried malt once typical for lambics, white beers, and scattered others around Europe, but the air and sun are probably how brewers were drying malt millennia ago in the Middle East and elsewhere. Even today, in parts of Africa, brewers use their own sun-dried sorghum malt—as with Rwanda’s ikikage beer, or Benin’s tchoukoutou, among others.
- You want a really pale color. Kilning gets you more color, while wind-drying gets you less. (There’s a reason the Belgians called them white beers.)
- You want to brew with unmalted grains or other adjuncts. Wind malt packs an enzymatic punch that can help convert the starches in unmalted wheat, oats, and more—another trait that worked well for lambics and white beers.
- You want an excuse to do more step mashes, decoctions, or wonky turbid mash regimes. Respect! Wind malt’s lower modification makes it a nice choice for elaborate mashes aimed at increasing efficiency, attenuation, and even flavor.
- You happen to have some barley growing out back. Maybe you’re a farmer, or you know one, and you want to harness the terroir that kilning can obscure.
- It’s not easy being green. There’s a sustainability factor—using wind and solar power instead of burning fuel for the kiln.
- Because you’re ready to throw caution to the wind. Sorry.
So, before this gets too long-winded, let’s wallow in some history before we get to brewing with wind malt—and, potentially, making our own.
A Missing Link?
We love the idea that beers based on historical recipes are the next best thing to time machines, giving us a chance to taste something from a bygone era. But there’s a problem: Most rely on modern malts—made from barleys that didn’t exist, processed by technologies that didn’t exist. Today’s malts are highly modified, and they’re made from newer varieties bred for yield and industrial efficiency.
“I’ve seen countless recipes offer up ‘replacement’ malts to replicate the beers of yesteryear, but who are we kidding?” says Seth Klann, cofounder of Mecca Grade Estate Malt in Madras, Oregon, in a post on their website. “If malt is the soul of beer, we honestly have no clue what beer tasted like a hundred years ago because we aren’t growing the same grains and malting using the same processes.”
That’s part of the reason Klann decided to produce Gateway, a wind malt made from flavorful Full Pint barley. Sugar Creek in Lebanon, Indiana, also makes and sells a product called Lambic Wind Malt. Like Mecca Grade, Sugar Creek uses more flavorful barley varieties not typically malted by larger commercial producers.
Using the same barley varieties as our ancestors is challenging and often impossible—see our articles about heritage malts and Dublin Castle ale for more about the challenges involved. Depending on the particular tradition, however, wind malt may represent a faithful re-creation of the malting process—one with major implications for the beer’s character.
“Typical pale two-row is exactly that—typical,” Klann says. “Light, unpretentious, and not much flavor. Gateway has a little bit more backbone, smells slightly like grass-straw, and is almost colorless. It really shines in pilsner, giving it a grassy nuance that helps it stand out from all the other lagers—and by grassy, I don’t mean the smell of lawn clippings. I mean harvest on the farm.”
Wind Malt in Belgium
Wind-dried malt was important to the lambics of Brussels and white beers of Brabant well into the 19th century. Georges Lacambre’s 1851 brewing treatise includes several references to malt séché au vent, which he calls “the simplest and probably the oldest” way to dry malt.
Notably, those beers also contained large portions of unmalted wheat and, in the white beers, unmalted oats. Back then, unmalted grains often formed more than half the grist. For Leuven’s witbier, for example, Lacambre describes grists of 45 to 55 percent wind-dried barley malt, 44 to 56 percent unmalted wheat, with the rest being oats. Some brewers preferred an even higher proportion of wheat; he cites a specific grist of roughly 61 percent wheat, 27 percent malt, and 12 percent oats.
Wind-drying required adequate ventilation, special care to avoid moisture, appropriate weather, and lots of turning (or shoveling) the malt. The Leuven brewers once dried theirs in “immense, well-ventilated attics.” Interestingly, the brewers preferred to keep the rootlets on their malt; it aided lautering and apparently added a certain herbal taste, “which is desired by the consumer and which cannot be modified with impunity.”
A reasonable theory is that these beers fell out of favor as malting technology improved. On the one hand, other beers got better; on the other, perhaps the old white beers were never the same.
On to Hoegaarden, whose famously reinvented spiced witbier is different from what was brewed there in the mid-1800s. Lacambre describes its grist as five to six parts wind malt, two parts unmalted wheat, and one to 1½ parts unmalted oats—thus, wind malt was about two-thirds of the grist. That older Hoegaarden beer was spontaneously fermented but served fresh, with lactic acidity having more say as it aged—a young cousin to Brussels lambic.
As in Leuven, the Brussels brewers liked to keep the rootlets on their malts—again, because it helped with filtration when working with so much unmalted wheat. In Raf Meert’s well-researched 2022 book Lambic, he relays an 1801 account of how lambic brewers made their own malt. Once the grain germinated, an important goal was to dry the malt without adding color. They did use a kiln in colder months—essentially just drying the malt with hot air—sometimes moderating the heat using horsehair carpets. “In the summer,” Meert writes, “the malt was simply air-dried in very thin layers.”
By 1851, many lambic brewers were using gently kilned pale malt—though some thought the product inferior to what they’d made before. Broadly, Meert’s reading is that lambic brewers weren’t so interested in barley malt’s flavor. Instead, they wanted its diastatic power and husks (and rootlets), all of which made it easier to brew with lots of unmalted wheat—at the start of the 19th century, that was as much as 65 percent of the grist.
A move away from wind malt coincided with a decreasing percentage of unmalted wheat in lambic. These days, wheat is typically 30 to 35 percent of the grist—the rest being reliable, commercially malted pilsner.
Where Else the Wind Blows …
Not long ago, when we talked about “farmhouse brewing,” we were probably talking about Belgian saison and French bière de garde. Our awareness has widened, thanks in no small part to the work of Lars Marius Garshol. While many of the traditions he’s found in Scandinavia and the Baltics involve kilns that smoke-dried malts—sometimes lightly, sometimes intensely—he’s also identified several places where farmers wind-dried their malt.
What’s become evident to Garshol, when it comes to drying germinated malt, is that “the only thing you really need to do is get the moisture out of the malt,” he writes in his book Historic Brewing Techniques. “How you do it is, of course, going to affect the flavor; but in the end, as long as you are fast enough to prevent mold and slow enough not to destroy the enzymes, it will work.”
Was the Norwegian weather always amenable to that, even in summer? Nope. One farmhouse brewer explains that if the weather was bad, they’d spread the malt out in the loft upstairs and keep a fire going in the fireplace. From Voll, western Norway, Garshol relays this description of the air-drying on one farm:
In the summer, they dried the malt in the sun and the wind. They spread it out on a carpet, a sail, or old bedclothes. The layer of malt could not be thick and had to be even. Now and again, they’d stir it with a rake. In the evening, they’d fold the cloth back up and take it indoors. The next day, it had to be carried back out. The children were given the job of keeping the birds away, so they didn’t eat anything. It was an easy job, which the children liked.
In Norway’s Voss valley, where the brewers ferment their long-boiled, juniper-tinged strong ales with kveik, they once used their own sun-dried malt. Garshol describes this malt as “something like modern pilsner malt, but with much more complexity.”
While many farmhouse brewers used wood-fired kilns, Garshol notes wind-drying in parts of Denmark, Estonia, Lithuania, Norway, Russia, and Sweden.
There are traditions elsewhere that used air-dried malt, including the white beers of Germany—Berliner weisse, gose, and even Bavarian weissbier. When Lacambre describes them in 1851, brewers there were first air-drying and then lightly kilning. Accounts from the previous century describe gose as a beer made from 100 percent air-dried wheat malt—a reminder that it need not be barley.
It may be true that wind malt was crude and primitive, and that brewers just about everywhere eventually came to view it that way. It could also be fair to say that beer would never be the same again.
And, if nothing else, wind malt may well be the most effective counterpoint the next time you hear somebody argue that “all beer used to be smoky.”
Wind Malt Today
North American brewers who want to make beer with wind malt in the year 2024 don’t need to make their own. There are at least two maltsters—Indiana’s Sugar Creek and Oregon’s Mecca Grade—that make and sell it, and not just to commercial breweries. Through online retailers, homebrewers anywhere can buy their wind malts by the pound.
At Mecca Grade, Klann’s method is to dry the malt in six-inch beds at 90°F (32°C) for a couple of days. It winds up being incredibly pale, 1.2 SRM (~1.5°L). Klann describes wort made with it as “nearly colorless.” Because of its low modification, he says it’s a good choice for brewers who want to step-mash or perform decoctions.
Klann was a homebrewer and farmer who taught himself how to malt grains—partly because he loved brewing historical styles and knew the malt wasn’t right. He describes wind malt as “the missing ingredient when brewing historic styles of beer.” His line: “You can’t build a Model T with Toyota Camry parts.”
In Madras, Mecca Grade is about 180 miles northeast of Eugene, where the brewers at Alesong like to use wind malt in their lambic- and farmhouse-inspired recipes (including the one for Touch of Brett.
Alesong cofounder and brewer Matt Van Wyk cites three reasons why they use wind malt. The first is that the ethos of farmhouse brewing doesn’t necessarily favor buying efficient commodity malt from far away. “Growing it yourself was the first step, and malting it was the second,” he says. “I imagine wind malt … is what someone could produce themselves on the farm. It lends an authenticity when making a saison or other farmhouse-style beers.”
The second reason is that wind malt’s relatively low modification is a good fit for how Alesong wants to brew, especially with its lambic-inspired beers. “When we brew our pseudo–turbid mash beers, we are welcoming an undermodified malt into the grist bill, so that our multistep mash process has a reason for happening, and we have a better chance of getting some unconverted starches and proteins into the wort for a long aging with Brettanomyces.”
Finally, Van Wyk says, the wind malt adds distinctive character. “It has the ability to lend a different flavor profile, and also some body and mouthfeel, to the finished beer due to the unconverted starches and proteins.” Although their base beers are very pale and dry, the wind malt gives them “more structure,” he says.
How One Brewery Makes Its Own
At Soul Barrel Brewing in Simondium, South Africa, they’re making their own wind malt from local Caledon barley. On the grounds of the former Drakenstein Winery in the Cape Winelands, the brewery’s coolship is a huge, century-old wine tank—that’s where they steep and germinate the malt. The drying happens outside, in the sun.
“It’s actually a fairly simple process,” says founder and brewer Nick Smith.
Cleaning: “The barley is very dusty when it comes in.” They first mix the grains in water and stir vigorously three or four times, getting the chaff to float to the top, then they scoop that stuff off.
Steeping: They then soak the grain in about two inches of water all day, letting it slowly drain overnight. The next day, they refill and steep again. “By then, usually we’ve reached around 45 to 48 percent moisture.”
Germination: “We try and spread the malt out evenly, then stir throughout the day to keep the moisture and air exposure even throughout the bed.” When most of the acrospires—the spiral-shaped sprouts—have grown to about three-fourths the length of the grains, the malt is sufficiently modified.
Drying: “We then haul it outside to dry in the sun. We have a big shade cloth that we lay out, spreading the malt out very thinly and evenly, in a spot against a wall that gets full sun all day, with the light also reflecting off the wall.” The wind also blows across that spot.
“We used to haul it in and out every day to keep it safe from rodents, but they can also find a way inside,” he says. “So, now we actually just leave it. There are a lot of birds of prey around us—we’re in a farm area—so we think if rodents or small birds come to eat, they run away quickly and don’t nest. We just view the small amount they take as a tax.” But there’s another benefit to leaving it out: “This way it dries in three days as opposed to a week.”
It’s possible to weigh the malt to see how much it’s dried, but “we just chew it at this point, to see how crunchy it is.” They also try to get rid of the rootlets. “Once it’s dried, you can rub the malt against the cloth or in your hand to run off the rootlets. It’s kind of a mission, but then the malt is done.”
Soul Barrel uses plenty of modern malts in its pale ales, IPAs, and so on, using wind malt for its most terroir-driven creations. These include the lambic-inspired Ale of Origin, fermented with a house mixed culture and barrel aged, finishing around 7.5 percent ABV. They also include it in Wild African Soul, a medal-winning mixed-fermentation blend with traditional umqombothi.
However, Smith says he wants to use wind malt in more of their offerings. “I’m at least trying to blend it into more of our beers,” he says.
Typically, the team can malt about 50 kilos (110 pounds) of malt per batch. Most of their beers are five-hectoliter batches that might get 100 to 150 kilos of malt. After the recent harvest, they made a few batches in a row and got the sense that they could scale it up. Smith’s goal in 2024 is to malt at least 1,000 kilos of local barley, 1,000 kilos of wheat, and 200 kilos of oats, “and then see if we can get some sorghum or other grains. We just need to work out a consistent grain supply.”
It’s a lot of work. Do they have to do it? No. The Soul Barrel team could make life easier on themselves and brew with modern, efficient, tasty, predictable commodity malts. But they’re seeking expressions of local flavor, and they love what they get from the wind malt—even if it is a bit primitive.
“The way we do it is very rudimentary,” Smith says, “but I like to imagine [this is how] malting was done pre-Industrial Revolution. Which adds to the character.”