In mid-October, five tonnes of organic Belgian barley enter the malthouse drum. The story of one week of steeping, germination and fossil-free kilning.
In mid-October, five tonnes of organic Belgian barley will tip into the malthouse drum in Dinant for the first time. Five tonnes is a well-loaded farm trailer — upwards of a hundred million kernels. Seven days later it will come out as malt, ready for a brewhouse or a bakery. In between: water, air, gentle heat and a fair number of shortened nights. Here is what the week of one batch will look like — the first one, and every one after it.
One drum, three jobs
Everything happens in a single horizontal vessel. The heart of the malthouse is a five-tonne germination-kilning drum: the grain germinates there, then dries there, without being shuttled from one machine to the next. In an industrial maltings these stages fill whole buildings linked by conveyors; here they follow each other inside the same slowly turning cylinder, which keeps the grain moving so the rootlets don't mat together. That is what makes clean, single batches possible: one barley, one farm, one week, one malt.
The rhythm is weekly. Roughly one batch a week — the tempo the grain asks for, not the one a spreadsheet would prefer. That cadence sets everything else: the volumes a maltster can honestly promise a brewer, and the care that can go into each stage, weighing included.
Two days under water: steeping
It starts with a bath. Barley arrives from the farm dry, around 12 to 13 percent moisture, deeply dormant. To wake it up, you submerge it, drain it, give it air, and start again. Over some forty hours of immersions and air rests, the grain climbs past 40 percent moisture. It swells, softens, and a white tip — the chit — shows at its base: the embryo is on its way.
Every litre counts. Steeping five tonnes of barley takes a great deal of water, and this is one place where a craft malthouse cannot afford to be careless. Reusing water, making it work several times before letting it go, is as much part of the trade as the temperature of the steeps — one of the circularity principles the malthouse was built around.
Four days in which the grain thinks it's been sown
Germination is an organised misunderstanding. The kernel believes it is in a field. It mobilises its enzymes, breaks into its starch reserves and starts building a seedling that will never see a furrow. The maltster's job is to let it — but not too far. For four to five days, at around fifteen degrees, the drum turns at intervals while you watch the rootlets, the length of the acrospire under the husk, and the smell of the bed, often compared to fresh cucumber.
A maltster is a gardener before being a cook. Too much germination and the grain eats the starch the brewer is counting on; too little and the malt stays hard and glassy, stingy with its sugars in the mash tun. It all comes down to hours and degrees, and it is never quite the same twice: barley from this field, this harvest, doesn't behave like last year's. That is also why a five-tonne batch is easier to steer than an anonymous silo — you know where the grain came from and how it was grown.
Drying without a drop of fossil fuel
Kilning locks in the enzymes' work. Once germination is where it should be, the green malt has to be dried — otherwise it moulds, or keeps transforming itself. First comes a large volume of warm air to bring the moisture down gently, then the temperature rises for the curing phase, which gives malt its colour and aroma. Low and brief for a very pale pils malt; a touch firmer for a pale ale malt; hotter and moister to reach the bread-crust notes of a munich or a vienna.
Here, that heat will owe nothing to fossil fuels. Kilning is, almost everywhere else, the gas-hungriest step in a maltings. In Dinant, the kiln air will be heated by hot water produced from biomass, with renewable electricity running the rest of the plant. Same barley, same temperatures, same malt — but dried without oil or gas, which is still rare in this trade.
One batch a week: who it's for
Every sack will know where it came from. The malting barley is Belgian and organic: part of it grown on the founder's own Demeter-certified farm, the rest by a Belgian organic farming cooperative. Out of the drum come base malts — pils, pale ale — plus munich, vienna and Belgian-style malts, delivered across Belgium and its direct neighbours: France, the Netherlands, Germany and Luxembourg.
Local malt is not always the right choice, and that should be said plainly. A germination-kilning drum does not roast: for a chocolate malt or a heavily pushed caramel malt, a brewer will keep buying from specialist maltings, and rightly so. Likewise, a brewery that needs absolute uniformity, silo after silo, will stay more comfortable with the big players. The weekly batch is for those who want the opposite: malt with a known farm, a known year and a known week of making — and the character that comes with that.
The first malting campaign starts in mid-October, and the drum will keep turning week after week from then on. If you brew, bake, or are simply curious to watch five tonnes of barley become malt, the malthouse team will gladly welcome you in Dinant — a message via mad.be is enough to arrange a visit or talk malt.