As the craft beer industry continues to grow, one German brewer has taken it into his own hands to keep the beer making process completely local.
Beer is made from four basic ingredients: barley, water, hops and yeast. For brewers, a process called ‘malting’ is a necessary step to allow barley and other raw grains to be converted into malt and used in the beer making process.
Aside from water, malt makes up over 90% of the ingredients that go into beer, so it’s a necessary component in the growing craft beer industry.
At present, local breweries purchase malt from large, often globally operating malting companies, as virtually no locally-made malt is available east of the Mississippi – until the past few years that is.
Epiphany Craft Malt, a regional malthouse in Durham, has worked to fill the need for locally-sourced malt since 2015.
Epiphany is owned by founder and maltster Sebastian Wolfrum, a former brewer from Germany.
Wolfrum said Epiphany partners with local farmers and breweries to produce base and specialty malts. In doing so, Epiphany fills the brewer’s need for local production by enabling the connection between farmer, maltster and brewer.
“The vast majority of local beer is only local by being made within the region that the brewery is, but everything else comes from far places,” Wolfrum said. “Most of the malt is made in the Midwest, up in Canada and then Europe primarily is what supplies the North American market here.”
Wolfrum said these foreign ingredients are made on a very large scale and that doesn’t allow for a lot of partnership and local economy stimulation in our area.
“As with everything else that you buy from somewhere else, most of the money goes somewhere else,” Wolfrum said. “In this case, from the source of growing it – to us malting it – to the beer being sold, all these people live in the community or in the wider region and so it [the money] all stays where we all live and have an impact.”
According to Epiphany’s calculations, the malthouse’s operations help to keep $1.8 million dollars in the regional economy. In 2018 alone, craft beer production in North Carolina had a $2.6-billion-dollar economic impact.
Wolfrum said while grain has been grown in this area for a long time there has traditionally been little use for barley as most of the industry outsources their materials.
So new crops and collaboration had to be introduced. Epiphany works with two North Carolina farms to grow their malt-quality barley – Perry Farms in Rolesville and White Hat Seed Farm in Hertford.
In normal times, this proves to be a successful partnership, providing local farmers with more crop to sell and malthouses like Epiphany the ability to create their own malt to sell to nearby breweries.
But with the COVID-19 pandemic, the craft beer economy is one of the many industries that have been affected.
Right now is when all the barley for Epiphany’s malting process will be harvested, but with many breweries still shut down, there is a lot less need for the crop. Wolfrum said they only have a third of the business they usually have.
“So now this grain is coming off the fields and it’s a lot and it’s more than we will need for this year until the next harvest and so those have been some difficult conversations – to talk to the farmers and figure out how much we really need,” Wolfrum said. “Because it’s such a unique and rare grain around here, there’s not a good secondary market where you can still get a reasonable price for your crop so it becomes a slight loss and that’s uncomfortable for me and certainly not fun for the farmers.”
On the other side of Epiphany’s supply chain are the brewers. Epiphany works with breweries across the Southeast including Dogfish Head Craft Brewery and Fullsteam Brewery as well as some local favorites like Top of the Hill and Steel String Brewery.
Eric Knight is one of the co-founders of Steel String Brewery in Carrboro. Steel String has been buying from Epiphany for the past three years.
Knight said one of the reasons Steel String invests in Epiphany’s malts is because he likes being involved in the beer making process from start to finish.
“Being able to work with a malter that’s local, hands-on – really you get to understand a lot more about what goes into the beer and how to select the best quality and varieties [of grain] for the beers we’re trying to make,” Knight said.
Additionally, during these difficult times, Knight says keeping it local and helping our local agriculture economy flourish is more important than ever.
“It’s really interesting to see how grain growers in the state are now feeding into the local economy and how that is creating a cyclical pattern that I think is really building a unique thing that we have here and it’s very exciting to see where it’s going to go in the next few years,” Knight said.
To learn more about Epiphany Craft Malt and their various partnerships in our community, visit their website.
Lead photo courtesy of Epiphany Craft Malt.
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