From Grain to Glass: Part 2
From Grain to Glass:
Part 2: Building a Sustainable and Scalable Malt Operation
BY JEFF FIJOLEK
With so much potential in the market and malt ready to sell, Cold Stream needed to find more customers than just Lumberbeard.
“It was 2019. We malted our first load of barley and didn’t really have a sales force, didn’t really have any distribution, and that’s when we partnered with LINC,” says Horlacher. LINC is the Local Inland Northwest Cooperative, founded in 2014 by Beth Robinette and Joel Williamson to serve as a food hub connecting regional farmers with customers, building a larger network to sell local produce and artisan goods. During the first few years of operating LINC Foods—while also brewing beer for and getting his other food co-op, The Grain Shed, off the ground—Williamson forged strong partnerships with Palouse Heritage, an Endicott farm founded by the Scheuerman family and committed to growing heirloom, landrace and ancient grains. Williamson, seeing the opportunity to malt local, heritage grains from Palouse Heritage and other craft cereals like those grown by Joseph’s Grainery in Colfax, began what would become LINC Malt in 2016.
LINC is making malt that no else can.
“LINC is making malt that no else can. They’re making [Elwha] Spelt, they’re making Purple Egyptian Barley. But the limiting factor they have is volume.” says Horlacher.
At their Spokane Valley malthouse, LINC Malt produces just north of 300 tons per year—a grain-sized amount compared to even Montana Craft’s annual output—their real impact is felt is among the community of local and regional brewers and distillers who, like Bret Gordon, want to have a connection to where their grain comes from. Representing these products and their producers in the greater marketplace is where Brian Estes, Partnerships Director for LINC and a member-owner of the cooperative, steps in.
“Brian has really taken to telling the story for us in the market,” adds Horlacher. “We handle the growing, the logistics and the bookwork; Brian and LINC take care of selling and distributing.”
With a background in produce, Estes had been working with LINC Food before joining the Malt team a little over five years ago, just as Spokane started experiencing its own craft beer boom. During the coronavirus shutdowns, he helped develop a plan to use neighborhood breweries across Spokane as designated pick-up points for LINC’s direct-to-consumer market box program. This strategy also takes advantage of a loophole in state liquor laws permitting taproom to-go sales. At the time, the plan afforded customers the opportunity to enjoy craft beers from local breweries when sitting down at the bar for a pint was not allowed. Now, LINC Box customers can still schedule a time to pick up produce and a pint at their nearest taproom. Unsurprisingly, deliveries are timed to go out with the week’s delivery of malt. For Lumberbeard, that means Friday. For LINC Malt and Cold Stream, that means a lot of grainbags. Since opening in late 2019, Gordon has built Lumberbeard into one of the top producers of beer in the region and going through a lot of malt in the process.
Bright orange LINC Malt stickers can be found proudly displayed in several taprooms—and haphazardly slapped on fermenting tanks around Spokane—a sign the brewers there have opted to use a locally grown, premium grain.
“Having such a small scale supply chain where every bag of malt has the farm’s name on it and such a tightly knit business model is completely unheard of for grain,” says Estes, “but long term, you see a world of growth opportunity.”
With the regional market accounting for much of LINC Malt’s small-scale, specialty grains, Estes has been on a mission to introduce Cold Stream to a Malt & Grain to a larger audience and get more of those stickers into breweries across the state and down the entire West Coast.
“I’m spending a fair amount of time in San Diego,” says Estes. “What we’re trying to do is identify brewers who we feel are like-minded from their interest in ingredients, their commitment to quality and their willingness to share what they know about the craft.”
The Grainmaker Beer Festival
For Horlacher and Estes, part of “telling the story” of Cold Stream and LINC Malt’s partnership is Grainmaker, a weekend campout in Latah where brewers can come together, see where this barley is grown and celebrate craft malt. In the weeks leading up to Grainmaker, invited breweries are paired off for special collaboration beers featuring malts from Cold Stream.
“We have a public-focused side with the Grainmaker Beer Festival at YaYa Brewing in Spokane Valley, and then we have a very private event which is just brewers and distillers on the farm,” says Horlacher. The event at YaYa serves as both a welcome party for out-of-town brewers and an opportunity to sample the many iterations of beer all created with malts from Cold Stream’s catalog, all while raising money for the Association of Washington Wheat Growers.
This year, over 30 breweries participated in the festivities, including Mexico’s Cerveceria Wendlandt. Based in Ensenada, Baja California, Wendlandt has won the title of best brewery in Mexico twice in the past ten years. Founder Eugenio Romero came to experience Grainmaker last year; this year, brewer Ben Matz and Celso Guzman made the trip up to Spokane in July to brew a Czech Lager for the weekend with Riley Elmer and Connor Kelly at Uprise Brewing using Francin Pilsner from Cold Stream as well as Baronesse Munich and Baronesse Vienna malts sourced from Joseph’s Grainery.
Bringing these brewers to the farms where Cold Stream malts are grown and to the LINC malthouse in Spokane Valley is to celebrate the progress so far and invite others to join in the next chapter.
“We really focus on just letting everybody marinate as a community and have the ability to come together and make memories but also build lasting relationships. We've had tremendous support from virtually everywhere. Folks from Ensenada, folks from San Diego, Portland, Seattle, Yakima, Spokane,” says Horlacher. Everybody kind of comes together, now that we've got a really good community of brewers that like are buying into this community."
But not everyone can make it to the farm, or even to Spokane. That is why Brian, LINC Malt and Cold Stream continue to spread their message of Palouse-grown craft malt to anyone in the industry who will listen.
“I can look at the beer of any of my customers and know which of my malts is in it,” says Horlacher. “One of my favorite things to do is to walk into a brewery and just sit down and ask the person serving to tell me about the beer. I went to Dual Citizen in Minneapolis like three weeks ago—they buy all their base-malt from us—and this beertender basically sat there and told me this entire story about how Bradley the brewer had searched the United States for what he wanted a malt and that he found it in the state of Washington. And the fact that the taproom staff is that knowledgeable, it’s easy to understand why they’re selling as much beer as they are. Because everybody is connected. Go to Seattle and do that. You go to Holy Mountain and Ravenna and most of those people can tell you the story about where the malt is coming from. It's pretty amazing.”