Last week, Tim and I had the chance to take a tour of Riverbend Malt House, a floor malting facility right here in Asheville. How cool is that?

We were pretty excited when Brian and Brent, co-owners of Riverbend, invited us in to introduce themselves and give us a tour of the malt house. They use only locally grown, organic barley, wheat, and rye, floor malting it all by hand no less!

I won’t go into crazy details on the process, but here are a few pictures of their equipment to get the gist of things.

The raw barley starts out here in the steeping tanks.

After steeping, it’s spread out on the floor to germinate. This step requires constant raking. It’s also the coolest looking part of the process, which is obviously very important.

Here’s the kiln, where the malt is dried and gets varying degrees of color and flavor, depending on what the maltsters are going for.

This contraption gets rid of the little squirrely bits (that’s the technical term).

And this one sifts through the malt to get rid of any kernels that aren’t the right size, as well as dust.

Bags and bags of finished malt! The whole process takes about a week to complete.

The Riverbend guys get their barley, wheat, and rye from local organic farmers right here in North Carolina. They’re processing all this malt by hand in small batches, taking great care and attention to making sure the final product is of the highest quality.

Artisan malts, made right here in Asheville. For NC brewers using Riverbend’s malt, that means ingredients with much less distance traveled, reducing their carbon footprint. Plus, you know you’re getting the freshest stuff possible. And it’s a product that’s made by people. Like, real ones. I saw them with my own eyes.

Riverbend’s philosophy totally jives with us, and we’re really excited to brew with their malts. The guys were nice enough to send us home with some malt to try out for ourselves. We’re planning to do some side-by-side recipe comparisons so we can see what differences in flavor we get out of their malt. Experiments!!!

Anyhoo, super cool. I’ll be sure to post about how the beers come out. Thanks again guys!