Anyone who has followed our efforts to build our own malting house a little will understand our joy. Now it's up and running, and nothing stands in the way of our very own malt whiskies. Here are a few thoughts and information. A more extensive version of this will be appearing shortly in the next issue of the 1515 Craft Bier Magazins . For now, we just want to raise a glass. Sláinte. Or 'Gsundheit', as we say around here.
The connections are actually quite straightforward. Anyone who distils whisky needs grain — and not just any grain, but malted grain. We'll come to why that is in a moment. Anyone making organic whisky therefore needs organic malt. And that's where the market starts to thin out considerably. If you also happen to grow rare grain varieties like emmer or naked oats in your fields, you naturally want to turn them into whisky too — and that's where the market falls away completely. So: malt it yourself. For someone who is inventive and thinks in cycles, as we do, the idea of setting up your own malting house right next to the still isn't so far-fetched at all.
On the process and the significance of malting in the production of whisky. Distillation works by exploiting the fact that alcohol has a boiling point lower than that of water. The alcohol evaporates before the water can get properly hot. The vapour is then cooled — voilà: schnapps. But this only works if the substance being distilled already contains alcohol. Otherwise, heating and cooling would serve no purpose whatsoever. With fruit, the alcohol is obtained by fermenting the sugars in the fruit.
The alcoholic pulp is called mash. Wheat, maize, and rye contain no sugar. No grain does. That's where malting comes in. In this process, the grain kernels are steeped and brought to germination. This produces green malt, and the starch in the grain (the amylose) is converted into malt sugar (maltose). Now we have sugar, which can later be fermented and then distilled. But first, the moist green malt must be dried and made storable. This process is called kilning.
The malting house is an important step on the journey from field to bottle
We opted for a modern Italian drum malting system. Just a few weeks ago, the first malt was bubbling away in the tank. For us, the decision was really quite clear. It means we have brought yet another significant step in the production process in-house, making us less dependent on the malt market. It also allows us to produce malt from our own grain in a wide variety of styles — which in turn gives us greater flexibility in developing our whiskies.
In Austria — and most likely in Switzerland and Germany too — we are currently out on our own with this. That is, having our own malting house within the distillery. In Scotland, things look a little different. There, however, we find ourselves in excellent company. The distilleries Balvenie, Bowmore, Highland Park, and Springbank all produce their own malt. Springbank still does so largely in-house; the others now only cover a portion of their needs this way. The malting house in Öhling is technically a drum malting system that allows smaller grain batches to be processed — precisely what we were looking for.
