2013 Brings New Things to CMC

Hello to all our brewing and distilling friends!

2013 is bringing many awesome things to Colorado Malting Company. First is our 3rd large malt vessel coming online. With this tank we have finished increasing our production from 2,000 lbs per month in 2009 all the way to nearly 40,000 lbs per month! This will allow us to get malt to you even faster than ever before. With plenty of high quality 100% local Colorado barley, wheat and Rye in storage, CMC is ready to provide our customers with another year of fantastic local products.

Only Colorado Malting Company gives Colorado to your beer and whiskey.

We wish a safe, productive and profitable 2013 to all our brewing and distilling friends. We are looking forward to serving you again in 2013.

Cheers Colorado!

It's a Frenzy...for Teff

Teff is a grass seed grown in the Northwest. It's sweet nutty flavor and gluten free properties make it ideal for either an adjunct or a base for your next gluten free beer. We have 500 lbs going to kiln tomorrow and if you'd like to get your hands on some you most certainly can. It is going fast, so hurry and contact Tim and see about having some malted Teff shipped to your front door today.

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Colorado Malting Company finds a thriving niche in producing malted grains

By Jeremy Meyer

The Denver Post

A small family farm in the San Luis Valley has suddenly found a niche in becoming the only independent producer of malted grains in the Rocky Mountains — and business is booming.
“This year we are predicting 336,000 pounds of total sales,” said Jason Cody, president of the Colorado Malting Company that has been in business for three years. “We ran complete out last year. We can’t raise enough to satisfy the malt house. We’re already to the point in 2013, we’ll have to acquire more land.”
The company now is providing grains for breweries throughout Colorado and New Mexico, including New Belgium Brewing, Ska Brewing, Wynkoop Brewing and Oskar Blues Brewery.
“The No. 1 reason people are using us is because of being local,” Cody said. “That is what these guys really want, to support local businesses. They want local barley in their beer.”
The venture began when the Cody family, which had been growing barley on the farm for more than 50 years, began to grow weary of the low-prices being paid by corporate breweries for its grain.
“We started seeing the microbrewery industry growing and we thought, what is this malting process?” Cody said.
His father, Wayne “Fudd” Cody, asked his friend and former Coors employee, Bob Wall, to help him figure out how to malt beer – a process in which grains are made to germinate by soaking in water and are then halted from germinating further by drying with hot air.
For the first batch, the farmers used a re-purposed dairy tank that held 500 pounds of grains. San Luis Valley Brewing and Three Barrel Brewing in Del Norte tried out the two-row barley and loved the results.
“We did that for almost a year, using one little tank,” Jason Cody said. “We decided to put the money into a bigger tank.”
They renovated their barn, built another tank that held 5,000 pounds of grains and designed their own electric kilns and grain systems and plan to go green in the near future.
“We want to go 100 percent solar and wind power to lower the carbon footprint to malt,” Cody said.
In addition to its popular Colorado two-row base malt, the company will be offering a host of gluten free malts and malted rye this year. It also is considering malting millet, quinoa, buckwheat and teff.
Cody said there are only five micro-malting companies in the United States. Coors malts its own grains in Golden. But the closest malting companies are in Wisconsin, California and Minnesota, he said.
Malted grains are as essential to beer as water. Malting is the process of controlling the germination and drying (or kilning) of barley, and is primarily used for brewing beer. It provides the sugars and enzymes for the yeast that eventually turn the steeped grains into that frothy, alcohol-filled concoction that pours from the tap.

Beer encounters of the best kind in southwest Colorado 2011 by Charlie Papazian

If you take the roads less travelled in Southwest Colorado there are some interesting breweries you deserve to encounter. Our first stop had to be Dolores River Brewpub.
Mark Youngquist founded this very small (I recall it was a 3-barrel system) brewery in a community of less than 300 residents as a labor of love. Mark began his brewing career in Boulder, Colorado as the Walnut Brewery’s first head brewer. Soon that company built other breweries and the Rock Bottom Brewery chain was born with Mark at the helm as corporate brewmaster. After several years of helping develop the company’s brewing systems he wanted to live in a smaller community and eventually open his own brewpub. It took many years, but it eventually happened. If you go you will be mingling with the locals and enjoying great pizza and extraordinary beer along the lines of pale ale, stouts and porters.
After overnighting in the nearby motel, we continued east and stopped by Tony Simmons’ Pagosa Brewing Companyin Pagosa Springs. Tony started the brewery as a mix of packaging and a tap room, but found the demand at the tap room warranted an evolution of his brewery to become a brewpub restaurant. He highlights locally and Colorado grown and produced foods. There you can have the best grass feed beef burgers within hundreds of miles. And the astounding variety of beers could keep you occupied for several days. We only had one short afternoon and tried a handful before moving on to the high valley town of Alamosa.
Alamosa is a farm town. Surrounded by fields of barley, grains and grassland that extend to the horizons or to the distant mountains. In Alamosa there are two destinations. First stop was newly founded Colorado Malt Company. One seems to drive endlessly on perpendicular straight line county roads until you arrive to their small operation on the Cody family dairy farm. The malt house and equipment are entirely self-fabricated, reminding me of the spirit of the early microbreweries in the 1980s. Nearby their germinating and drying building was a newly built facility hoping to more than double their capacity. They are providing pale malt for small brewers. They are also malting specialty grains and specialty types of malt which are difficult to produce in large facilities.
A visit is nothing less than inspiring in this place that seems to be in the middle of nowhere. Obviously the malt energy reaches far and wide as I learn one Idaho brewer desiring to brew a local beer, sent down a load of Idaho barley to have it malted for a special edition ale they were preparing to offer to their best customers.
Colorado maltster Wayne Cody, his wife and our family rendezvoused at the downtown San Luis Valley Brewpub for dinner. I’d been here before and their brewpub continues to offer beers quenching the local farm thirst – an excellent Mexican-style lager alongside IPA, brown ales and stouts. The brewpub is in an old city bank building and the bank vault door with all its gears and intricacies are in full view and offer an interesting visual diversion after a few brews.
Next day we headed the long day’s journey back to Boulder County, but not before stopping at Eddyline Brewpubin Buena Vista, Colorado. Nearby is a creek featuring kayaking. But the real treat is a full line of Eddyline’s true to style lagers and ales. The brewpub is setting up a 15 barrel brewing facility closer to downtown Buena Vista and retaining the restaurant as a feature. Both should be operational by this time. There’s terrific food here and a super comfortable and relaxing ambiance. Brewer Scott used to work for Dominion/Fordham brewery in Delaware before moving west… I’m sure Buena Vista locals are glad he did.
After lunch, a taste of their sampler and a quick view of their then existing 5 or 6 barrel brewhouse – we were headed home to my lagering and conditioning homebrew

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