From Grain to Glass: Part 1
From Grain to Glass:
Part 1: The Art and Science of Farming Barley
BY JEFF FIJOLEK
The Art and Science of Farming Barley
Matt Horlacher and his family have been farming in Latah and Tekoa, 40 miles southeast of Spokane, for four generations.
“I've worked in agronomy for my whole life, since I graduated from college,” says Horlacher. “I guess I really like the idea of taking a crop and seeing where it goes.”
Farming is both an art and a science, all with an eye on the bottom line amid fluctuating market prices, production logistics and countless uncontrollable natural factors. These days, the crop Horlacher has set his focus on is barley.
“I like having barley in my rotation, but for the longest time, we couldn't make any money. I had worked in food barley for quite a while, commercializing varieties that were bred elsewhere in the world to work in this area. And then I thought, ‘you know, I can do this with malt. We can take varieties that have special end-uses, and we can commercialize them here, adapt them to work here.’”
According to the Washington Grain Commission (WGC), of the 80,000-plus acres of Washington barley harvested in 2023—including an area of approximately 10,000 acres across the state from the Palouse in the Skagit Valley—less than one percent was for human consumption. Ninety percent went to animal feed—rolled, ground or flaked before finding its way to farms and into the diets of cattle, pigs and poultry.
The ten percent that remains goes to malt, the process during which barley is steeped in water and allowed to germinate before being kiln-dried and cleaned. Malting encourages the production of enzymes within the grain that convert starches to sugars; in Eastern Washington, that means it provides the backbone for the rest of the brewing or distilling process.
The Process of Malting and Its Impact on Brewing
The basic ingredients needed to distill alcohol are simple—water, yeast and something to feed it. For many consumer alcohols, that takes the form of a malted grain, like corn in moonshine or barley in Scotch. There are rice lagers and wheat beers, but when it comes to brewing beer, water and yeast ferment while feasting on malted barley before hops are added and it is allowed to age; and with those elements plentifully available across the state, it’s no surprise that Washington has had a great impact on the craft beer movement of the past 40+ years.
Situated at the base of the dry, eastern slope of the Cascades, the Yakima Valley accounts for over 70% of the hops grown in America, representing roughly half the annual worldwide production of these bitter green buds. It was here in the early that Grant’s Pub is credited as the first brewpub to open in the country since Prohibition; there, the Yakima Brewing and Malting Company introduced an India Pale Ale, a style of beer that placed a spotlight on locally-grown Cascade and Chinook hops and the citrussy spice they can add to a quaff. Over the years, the names of these hop varietals and others have become common parlance, with the term ‘hop-head’ often used to describe a fan of craft beers. As this national and international audience has grown over the past half-century, so too has attention on the other components of craft brewing and distilling.
In 2018, Bret Gordon made a visit down to Latah to visit Horlacher. After completing the University of California San Diego’s brewing certificate program and learning on the job at various breweries in southern California, Gordon had made the decision to move to Spokane and start Lumberbeard Brewing.
“We're sitting in the combine and he said, ‘Man, I wish you guys could malt this—I'd love to buy malt 30 miles from my taproom’. And that kind of got it started it for me,” Horlacher recalls in July. “So we started doing that with a couple Steffi and Francin varieties, which are really unique. One’s Bavarian, one’s Czech. So we've been working with those and added in some new varieties over time.”
Coldstream Malt & Grain
When setting out on this venture, Horlacher partnered with the family of a former client from his days as a commercial agronomist. Together, they established Coldstream Malt & Grain. Nowadays, partner Chris Riggers, 28, manages barley fields spanning two states, including Clearwater Farms in Nez Perce, Idaho, where his family has farmed since 1895. Riggers takes care of the day-to-day grain handling, processing and trucking, leaving Horlacher to focus on the agronomy—the science behind seed, soil and production at scale—as well as building up sales and the forward-facing side of the business.
“I think we're gonna be at 1300 to 1500 tons this year, and this will be our fourth crop,” says Horlacher. “This will be the first year that 100% of our barley production will go into our own bags.”
Before this barley makes its way into a bag stamped with the Cold Stream logo, it still has to be malted. Producing a quality malt product requires a good amount of space and energy—and if you’re going to build a malthouse from the ground up—money.
“When we started in this, we were like, ‘you know, we're doing this for everybody else, why don't we just do it for ourselves?’ We were going to build a malt house in 2019. Then COVID happened. So we partnered with Montana Craft Malt to do our processing for us. Then, as that went along, we saw we were trying to replicate what somebody else already had capacity to do,” says Horlacher. “Now, we have a really close relationship with them. They buy about 40% of their barley from us.”
Cold Stream Malt & Grain's Beginnings
Malting as a process has been used to treat grains including barley since at least 3000BC, but one that has grown in terms of technique, efficiency and quality beginning in the late Middle-Ages (the first record of malted barley sold for the purpose of distilling Scotch whiskey was in 1494.) Typically, a barley operation of Horlacher’s or Riggers’ size might harvest their grain and sell it to a regional cooperative or malthouse by weight and grade to be mixed with product from other farmers, then prepared, packaged and sold on a commercial scale under a house label—a common practice for many commodity farmers who find financial success based primarily on their agricultural output. This model also allowed for malthouses to build a customer base by producing a standard product to serve as a quality blank canvas for brewers and distillers to use as part of the next step towards consumption.
Horlacher used to sell his barley to Great Western Malting, founded in 1934 and based in Vancouver, Washington. There, his grains could be included as part of one of their many “base-malts”—among them are “Pale High Color,” “Superior Pilsen,” and a source-specific specialty blend called “Pure Washington Malt.” Made of Palouse grain like Horlacher’s, you won’t find the names of any one specific farm on these sacks—and that’s if they arrive in grain bags rather than in bulk via pneumatic tanker for silo storage—but that would be a lot to expect of a company that along with Canada Malting Co. have a combined production capacity of over 750,000 tons. Both companies are part of United Malt Group, which, after being acquired by Malteries Soufflet in 2023—itself a subsidiary of French agricultural cooperative InVivo—make up the largest malting operation in the world, with a total production capacity of 3.7 million tons of grains processed across more than 40 facilities and 20 countries around the globe. By comparison, the production at Montana Craft Malt’s four-year-old facility in Butte caps out near 10,000 tons annually.
Upon approval of the acquisition, InVivo touted their commitment to continue supporting and servicing the international craft brewing sector, meaning that “Pure Washington Malt” and, potentially, grain that Horlacher had sold to Great Western in the past has already been available and accessible to consumers around the world.
Horlacher and Riggers don’t want their own grain bags out of vanity, but they do want end-users of malt bearing the Cold Stream name to know that the growers have invested in producing a grain that performs better in the brewhouse than the mass-produced options and that is better for the long-term soil health of their farmland and our regional ecosystem, too.
The farms that supply Cold Stream’s barley are all Salmon-Safe Certified, meaning they have undergone independent review to ensure that their practices including long-term soil conservation techniques and ensuring any chemical processes taken by farmers protect the quality biodiversity of our waterways. These measures help protect the Clearwater and Snake Rivers that sit immediately downstream from the Riggers’ property in Idaho.
Cold Stream has also started growing a strain called Lexy, a Flexi-Malt variety developed by a German seed company with roots in Bavaria. Horlacher is excited about Lexy because it is more tolerant to our regional climate and requires less energy and water during the malting process.
“A lot of the big guys aren’t doing that, but we’re able to,” says Horlacher, while pointing out that developing these craft products and building a brand is not without its own expenses and desire to tap into the international market. “Some of these varieties are huge investments. You bring in barley seed air freight from the Czech Republic, which is expensive and you don’t even know if you’re going to be able to make it work.”
