Welcome everyone to The DC Beer Show. We are
@DCBeer across social media.
Brandy, what are you drinking this lovely evening? Hi, Jake. And
everybody. I am drinking Dynasty.
I know it's not March anymore, so don't hate on me. I'm
drinking Dynasty's Martzen-style amber
lager, 6.3, clocking it in. I love the
argyle pattern on the thing. Mike Stein, it
looks like, visually, you're in a disco right now, but I'm assuming
you're not. Unless you are, and if you are, I'm gonna be upset about it.
No, Brandy. I left the discotheque, so don't worry. You're
not missing anything. I am having an
Essex, an extra special bitter
ale from our friends at Bluejacket. This beer is
brewed exclusively with Valley Malt out of Hadley,
Massachusetts. We are gonna be talking to them a little bit later on the pod.
And it's just a wonderful humdinger of a
humdinger. You know, jammy, malty,
little bitterness, little sweetness, just an absolute Goldilocks
of a beer. Balance, not too bitter, not too sweet, but all of the
above. Jordan, mister Harvey of the Harvey
Wilder Foundation, what are you having?
Well, you know, I feel like people have missed,
having a hazy on the pod, right? So, you know, I
thought why not shout out my local haze factory that I'm there
every Wednesday, especially shout out to GM. He's one of those hand
truck heroes, and I'm currently having one of those bad boys, so I'm
not sure if you guys got your hands on that, but that was a nice
little imperial double IPA Mosaic Mosaic
Incognito, even though it's very present, Citra
Motueka, and Mosaic Cryo, so just some of my favorites. And,
yeah. Jake, what's, what's in the glass? You know, in honor of
our guests at Valley Malt, I looked long and hard to the beer fridge today
for something from Notch Brewing. Didn't find it.
Did find something from Fox Farm Cabin, their smoke
hellish lager, but I'm not sure that uses Valley Malt. I think
that might use Thrall, a Connecticut maltster, in addition to
some other things. And so like Mike, I settled in on
Essex, which at one point I believe was British malt
as an ESB is, Maris Otter, and
Crystal. But then in true American fashion, we threw that shit
into the Boston Harbor, and now we are using Massachussetts'
very own Valley Malt. Again, it's
lovely on cask. It's very nice in my glass at
about 55 degrees or so. Nice prickly hot
presents, little jam, little biscuits. What can you say? It's
got, like, a nice tea ish quality to it. It's 4%.
We like it a lot. Thank you to Bluejacket, and thank you to
Andrea at Valley Malt as well.
Alright. We got action-packed events
this weekend, Friday, today.
See some DC Beer folks over at DC Brau for a
happy
we've been all around the mid Atlantic and the DMV, and we're finally
back in Maryland for another beer share. So I'm excited about
that. We're gonna be at one of my neighborhood pubs, I'll call it,
Third Hill Brewing Company. For those unfamiliar, it's in the the home
of the place formerly known as Astrolabe. But, hey, 30 Hill
is in the building, and they are doing wonderful things, growing copious
amounts of beer, varieties
seen everywhere and loved by all beer lovers
worldwide. So, yeah, we'll be there. Come come and see us. Bring some of
your favorite mixed firm or your favorite
spring patio beers because we'll be enjoying those all beer share
day. So that is gonna be Sunday, 2 to 5. In between
Friday Sunday is Saturday, and
there's gonna be a Women's Brew Culture Club event at
Lost Generation led by Brandy.
So this weekend is honestly the busiest weekend
in April for DC Beer. Friday is a thing,
Saturday is a thing, and Sunday is a thing. Saturday is
the Women's Brew Culture Club, and and we're at Lost
Generation. We haven't been to Lost Generation since last year. It's been almost a
whole year. It's our anniversary of Lost Gen, and I'm
so excited to be back. It's from 2
to 5 or 1 to 4. I don't know. I'll look it up,
and I'll put it on the Instagrams for you. What
else is going on? So many things. Yeah. We we actually you
know, if you if you're busy this weekend, you should be busy with DC
Beer, but if you're busy this weekend, we'll forgive you. Just come and see us
on Wednesday, we'll be at Other Half. Again, my one of my
favorite haze factories in the whole wide world will be there for trivia.
We do trivia every Wednesday, but at least once a month, you'll get a a
DC Beer, capital trivia, and Other Half
exclusive trivia, right? And for our Patreon members, you guys get a you guys do
get a 10% discount, and, one of the rounds will be all things
beer. So for you guys that wanna learn about beer knowledge or
just kinda fix your beer knowledge muscles, come out and see us at the Other
Half. We can start at closer to 7 o'clock, but, get there at 6:30 on
Wednesdays, April 10th specifically, and, we'll have a good show for
you. Patreon, what's that? How can I be
down and join Patreon? Well, Brandy
has so eloquently put together some wonderful signs. You can
scan our QR codes on our Patreon signs when you come to our events, or
you can just click our link on our Instagram page. You can also learn more
about us on Twitter or X, whichever you call it, it's still Twitter for
me. Yeah. You can definitely do that, and you can and also just check out
our website, you know, DC Bureau across all social media and
dcbrew.com should it be starred and favorited in your
favorite browser? I wanna talk about how dcbrow is the
first canned NA beer, but I'm but
I haven't had it. I'm curious what it tastes like, and I'm sad because Other
Half has had theirs out for quite a while now, and we'll
be packaging very soon, but missed the, I guess,
deadline of the being the first package. Yeah. I am
super curious about this as well. I don't think any of us
have had the DC Brau beer. I think that all of
us, the 4 of us on the show, we've all had all NA
everything at one point. I mean, to me, it's good enough for, like,
I'm at Other Half. And if I know I'm gonna be there for a couple
hours, I'm gonna sub in all NA everything
in the middle of a session and just, you know, chill out there for
a bit and then go back to say, tall Kiwi, which I
believe is still on tap, top notch, hazy, Jordan and I just making
kissy faces, about tall kiwi. We love we love our southern our
southern hemisphere hops, folks. You know? It's just So it's what we You're right. In
that tall kiwi is delicious and that you can't have,
you know, 4 of them in 4
hours. But you could have 2 of them in 4 hours and 2 and all
NA everything
Yeah. For the women's for the women's panel at Other Half that I
had to emcee. I started out with 2 at NA beers.
And so and then my job was done and then and
then I just drank whatever and then had that cocktail. But, yeah, for real. And
a beer when you're at the control board and then something when it's, credit when
the credits are rolling. But I think, Brandy, to your point, we always try to
be, especially our esteemed editor Jacob
Scoops Berg, first, first, right? We try to scoop
Washingtonian and Barred In DC and DCist and
all of our friends out there in the media escape but I think the reality
is whoever puts beer in can first it looks like DC Brau is going to
sort of best, quote unquote, best Other Half, if you will.
Who's gonna be making NA beer 2 years from
now, 5 years from now, 10 years from now?
Because there is market share to be gained. Right? NA
beer is ascending. Craft beer, beer
sales nationally are down. So if
we can have a brow and an Other Half beer 2
years from now, 5 years, a brow and an Other Half and a beer 10
years from now, I'm on board with all of that.
Yeah, just one point, and again, it's not beer, but it's
beer adjacent. I'm a huge Hoplark Cop Tea fan,
and Other Half, they did a collab with them, so, you know, they may not
have canned their NA, but Other Half and, Hoplark did
a collab and they canned some hot water. So I think Other Half
is on the horizon of doing it. But for now, you guys take the cake.
I'm just, you know, I do have a can of, some Other Half
hoplark in my fridge right now. I will say when it's done well, because I've
had some pretty not good NA beers that I would
not drink. Here's the thing. I don't drink unless I like
the flavor. Like, I know a lot of people who will just drink
whatever is put in front of them just to get drunk or just to
drink. If I don't like the taste of it, I'm not going to
drink it. I've rarely had an NA beer that I
really liked, And and I will say Other Half for
me, really is the best NA beer that I've had. So I'm very
curious, to try more and more. And I think the more they
come out, the better they will be. Right? For sure. No. You're you're
not wrong, Brandy. There's just, forces in the
market that I find don't always bring the best
product to market or have it readily available. And so what I mean by
that is, when Jake and I were writing this piece on
nonalcoholicbeer, go to dcbeer.com, check out our most recent on nonalcoholicbeer,
We scoped the supermarket, and there were hop waters and
dry hop seltzers. All of these products that are not beer, they're not
nonalcoholic beer, they're hop water. They didn't have Port
City's hot water in this grocery store. Right? And
I just felt like, yeah, the Lagunitas is good. Yeah.
The Sierra Nevada is good, but I feel like the Port City is better, and
that's just my palate. But to your point, Brandy, about I drink what
I want, and I don't just drink it to get a buzz on.
I really genuinely want the flavor. There needs to be a reason and
purposeful mindful drinking consumption even with something that's 0
calories and 0 carbs like hop seltzer.
Exactly. Yeah. The Port City is the best product, but for whatever reason, I could
have La Canada seltzer, I could have Sierra Nevada, or I
forget who the third one was. And so that's what's
happened. Now we're hoping to see growth in the NA space because I
saw over a dozen brands of NA beer, some that I didn't
know, like, today I learned. Peroni has a 0.0,
TsingTao has a 0.0. And I haven't tried
either of those but, you know, if they're better than the Other Half
or the Brau NA beer, I mean, 1, I'll be surprised. I'm biased,
of course. But, 2, it's like the stylistically they're going
for that, you know, light pale beer that cuts through street
food, pizza, fries, like, lo
mein, you know, those foods that are tend to be pretty hefty
comfort food with light, crisp, highly carbonated beer.
Right? But maybe you want a 0.0 beer. Alright. On
that note, we've got a wonderful guest for
you. Mike Stein, take it away. I'm
so excited to have Andrea Stanley, owner and
founder of Valley Malt, as well as Ground
Up Stone-milled flours with us. Thank you for
joining us on The DC Beer Show. Thanks, Michael, for having me.
It's great to be here with you. It's great to see you. The last time
I saw you, you were at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American
History. What a what a great event that was. That was a
a pretty amazing event, and, what a final
moment for Theresa McCulla, who did such amazing work in
terms of craft beer history and at the
Smithsonian. We are we are massive fans of Theresa
McCulla, and her work. The archives and all the beer history
she's preserved have been wonderful. But speaking of
archives and beer historians, I reached out to our mutual
friend, Ron Pattinson, who described
you thusly. He said, Andrea has a passion for malting as
strong as any brewer's for beer. She
helped enormously in my Obadiah poundage collaboration with
Goose Island by making brown malt the really scary
way. Something that something
that I doubt I would have have ever dared take on.
She's also great company if you're a huge beer nerd with her
depth of knowledge of barley and malting. So
that was our good friend Ron Pattinson. So we'll talk a little bit
about, Ron and his Obadiah poundage beer later, specifically
the beer and your contribution to it. But I wanted to say, they say
that malt is the soul of beer. Do you believe this to be true? Does
this make you a certified soul woman producing
the soul of beer? Michael, this is such a good
question. I think people are the soul of
beer. You know? People need to make the malt
and the ingredients and the beer, and it's
if I really think about what a soul feels like to me,
I would say it's it's the humans that put everything into what they're
making that make the soul a beer. However, making malt
does take a lot of humans, so I guess, you know,
it's a piece of it. But I can see why people back in the day
made that statement because, you know, clearly so much about
a beer relied on the malt, and even to this day it
still relies on the malt for so much of what we
love about beer. Well, that's that's certainly true. A lot of
labor goes in, and you need people for the labor. You are one of
those wonderful people. And without you, Valley Malt wouldn't exist. So
tell us about Valley Malt. When did you start? How's it going? And and
what projects are you currently working on that you're excited about?
I'm gonna go real quick on the Valley Malte story. So 2009,
was really interested in local food and trying
to sort of have my footprint of what I ate and drank be as local
as possible. And I've read an article in a local
newspaper about a bakery that was starting to try to
make one bread a week that had local wheat in it that
was locally milled. And I thought, oh my god. I never
thought about grains as a local ingredient and as an actual, like,
agricultural product and that farmers had to grow, and that was,
like, in the soil somewhere. So that kind of started my journey
into thinking, oh, I'm a home brewer. Let's try to make an all local
beer, realizing that malting was this missing step.
And we started our 1st malt house in 2,000
10 with 25 acres of barley that was grown in the local field,
and it's been a great journey of just like learning how to malt,
learning about grains, trying to support more sustainable
agriculture, and then, you know,
understanding what it is that craft brewers in the northeast actually might
want from a local maltster. And so that can kinda answer
part of, like, your question of what's going on right now, which is,
you know, we're making really great pale malt, pilsner
malt, a Golden Valley pale, which we tried
to clone, like, a Golden Promise style
malt, but more locally, a dextrin
malt. You know, we've kinda streamlined what we make because we're
making 9 ton batches now, but we're also having
fun. So, I I received a book in
20 19 when I was in the Czech Republic that was
written by a maltster in 1929 in the Czech
Republic, translated in 2005, and we're
basically trying to recreate a Czech Pilsner malt. And so that's
been really fun, is just to, like, think about how to recreate
malts that we're not currently making, and why we
would do that. And then like in this book, learning
about, you know, even just tracing, like, COAs
from essentially almost a 100 years ago. Right? 1929
is almost a 100 years ago. What did they care
about on their COAs? You know? And, like,
okay. Can we even recreate those COAs
with the current testing that we have? I mean, we can, but,
you know, like, commercial testing is always hard to find, you
know, labs that can do certain things like a dextrin maltose ratio
or a sugar to non sugar ratio. So if you
know anybody that wants to buy an under modified Czech Pilsner malt
So let's let's zoom let's zoom back out here for a moment. What is
COA? And let our listeners
know you went to the Czech Republic. What happened after
that? What does Czech barley have to do with
malting in Massachusetts to grow in New York, and what's a COA?
Yeah. So COA of a certificate of analysis. So it's like,
you know, if I'm a brewer, I wanna know how much, like, what's the color
of this malt gonna be on my beer? Is it gonna make me a dark
beer or a light beer? Or is it gonna give me a little bit of
sugar that is gonna create, like, a low alcohol
beer or a lot of sugar that's gonna create a high alcohol beer.
So that kind of thing is, like, these important characteristics that you need to
know. So it's a little bit of a contract in a way, like, here's what
we're supplying you. But as you start getting into
different types of malt, you're looking at that COA to sort of figure
out how it's gonna impact your, like, what you're gonna be able to make with
it. And yeah, the, the Czech Republic thing was like
pre COVID 2019. We were all like
traveling. There was a heirloom barley
conference that was going on in Munich,
and we went a little bit early because we were interested in visiting
with some Czech barley breeders because some of the best barley in the
world for malting and beer making comes from the Czech
Republic. I was like, Oh man, this is like, I've been making malt
now for know, 10 years, and this is like my big
sabbatical trip where I get to go and Yeah. See where it all came
from. You know? You're looking at the source, and I think it's really important to
note that, despite those of us in the craft
beer, independent beer, small beer world, still the majority of
beer sold in America is light beer, but that light beer even is based
on the golden Pilsner style beers of Czechia
or Bohemia, and that is based around
a high quality barley as the lore sort of
goes. You know, our barley grown in America wasn't as light
as the famous Czech barley, so we use rice or we use corn and
to produce. But, anyways, yes, you were tracking the source. And so
now that barley has come stateside or there's there's
some connection when we Yeah. Yeah. It was more just, we went to the
promised land. We I learned in my time there that actually,
like, when the Czech Republic became part of the EU,
there was this agreement that they designated, like,
this is Czech Pilsner malt, and this is exact you know, almost
like an appellation where it's like, this is exactly how it's made. Same thing
with Czech beer. You know, it had its own sort of
designation with the EU, and I was like, wow, that's really cool,
like, on a certain level. You know? Because it's so un
American on a certain level. So from a cultural standpoint, I
was like, wow. You know, that's a unified thing. Right.
Well, you do do something different with with regards to
Bluejackets. So we have the local brewery Bluejacket who's been buying your malt
for at least a year now. They recently received, I don't
wanna say an award, but a certificate, let's say, from
you because they've been using your malt which supports,
local economies or local agronomics. Tell us a little bit about, cause it's not just
Bluejacket. It's everybody who uses your malt once they use enough of it. So
there's the beer history nerd, which is part of me, and
Valley Malt, and then there's sort of the sustainability and supporting
local sustainable agriculture, which is a huge part
of what we, like, exist to do. And so,
if a brewery like Bluejacket buys a pallet of malt from
us, that supports 1 acre of sustainable
agriculture, because that grain is serving as a cover
crop. It's helping with soil erosion
and leaching of nutrients into watersheds, so it's
a really important sustainable crop that, by
supporting the malting of it, you're supporting
that sustainable agriculture, because otherwise it's really hard for
a farmer to grow something that's sustainable if nobody's there to buy
it. So yeah, so they Bluejacket,
every time they get a pallet from us, they get a cute little card that
says this pallet supported an acre of local of local
agriculture. And then over the over time,
they've racked up the acres so that then
they get a a label for their brewery that says, you know, in
2023, we supported 5 acres or 6
acres of local agriculture, and then it
could be a banner where they've supported 25
acres, 50. So over time, it really builds up.
That support really has impact. Yeah. The last time I
saw Roe Gunzel, who's the head brewer at Bluejacket, director of brewer
operations, he was letting me know about this. He was like, do you wanna see
it? But it was wonderful. And, you know, we
we've been having Bluejackets Essex, their extra special bitter,
and they used to use Maris Otter and English
crystal malts, but they've now switched exclusively to your
malt, to Valley Malt. Tell us a little about some of the value outside
of the environmental value your malt adds to products,
you know, like local beer or blue jacket or even local Spirits, because I
know distillers are using your malts as well. Yeah.
I mean, we try to be I think the sustainability is sort of our
basic why we exist, but then also
we have our own personalities that we each
lend to how we run our malt houses, because I'm
obviously, Valley Malt's not the only malt house in the northeast.
And I think we're really into trying to
find the malts that are coming from quite a distance that
brewers just can't get away from, like something like a Maris
Otter or, you know, serving German malts,
Golden Promise is one of them. How do we try
to make that malt locally and limit the amount of
miles that that has to travel to get to the
brewery? Not only for sustainability reasons,
but bonus, it's fresher, and that actually
does come through in the wort in the beer. When
you're brewing something that was just malted 2 weeks ago,
it's like coffee, you know? It's you can taste it, and you can
taste that it has just a more intensity of
aroma and and more layers of
flavor in there. Yeah. Well said. I've heard you use the the
metaphor as malt like coffee before, and it's so
valid for It really makes a huge,
tremendous difference with product. And, you know,
it's it's interesting with your malt, you've had,
big brewers like Goose Island. You know, Ron
Pattinson, the the beer historian, mentioned using your malt in the Goose Island
project, but you also sell the smaller brewers like Bluejacket, and
others. Do you have a sense of,
you know, the difference in selling to big brewers or
small brewers? Do you have some favorites or people that you really
enjoy working with? Both, honestly.
Because at the end of every email is a person,
and a lot of times, there's just, like, some really
lovely relationships that can form even just over email,
especially when you're geeking out about malt. So, yeah. No. I
would say, like, I probably have certain biases
against bigger breweries versus smaller breweries because
we trend toward the smaller malt house. Right? We're kind of the
underdog, and so I think I my biases are maybe more toward
customers that are smaller. But also,
it's you know, it really comes down to just, like, the relationships and who
we're working with, and, like, there are some bigger breweries like Goose
Island, where the people there are just so passionate about
what they do and about, you know, trying to recreate this historic beers, and
they have the platform to be able to do that.
And, yeah, just the appreciation a lot of times that bigger
breweries might have to be working with a smaller supplier,
that relationship actually feels really great too.
So before we close out, Andrea, I wanted to ask you a little
bit about GroundUp, stone milled
flours. So GroundUp started in 2019 as
a sister company to Valley Malt. We had a
bakery in our town approach us about milling for
them, and we found out that there was a manufacturer of these
beautiful stone mills not that far away in Vermont,
so we added, a mill, and we just milled for that one bakery
for the 1st year, and then COVID hit, and people couldn't
find flour, and we started to really, started to really, realize that
being a miller was something that we wanted to do, so and that
was needed. And we make stone milled flours,
which are very different than the normal flour that you would find on the
shelves because it hasn't been bleached or bromated or
enriched. It's just the whole grain going through the mill
and then being lightly sifted, so it still has a lot of
nutrition, a lot of dietary fiber, really
good generally good type of carbohydrates,
iron, potassium, things in it that, you know, are
gonna give people the nutrition that they need in their
carbs, and then we just added on a,
pasta shop, so we're starting to make fresh pasta now out of these grains,
which has been really delicious. And so, yeah, you just
really get to really learn more and more about each type of
grain and all the attributes of it in terms of
flavor and texture, and it's kind of a fun adventure if
people are interested in cooking, baking,
making pasta. I would say check out Ground
Up Grain because, you know, that's what we're trying to do is just be
that local mill that is trying to express the
best that local agriculture is growing
in terms of grains. Andrea, thank you so much for
joining us here on The DC Beer Show. You have been a wonderful
interviewee. Any parting words or anything final you'd
like to share with our with our listenership? Just that I can't
say enough about how grateful I am for you, Michael, in our
friendship over the years and, you know, what you do
and the platform that you give other people to be able to
share what they do. I really appreciate you. Thank you
so much, Andrea. Thank you, Mike, for interviewing.
Alright, everybody. In addition to all the events that we mentioned, we will see you
out and about. The Maryland Craft Brewers Festival is coming
up as well. It's happening on the
11th May, and by that time, there could be, like, 6 more
vanish locations in Maryland. I just learned this week there
were 2 2 vanish locations in Maryland. I had
no idea. I thought there was one. But no. Me either.
Yeah. Yeah. And, again, we wanna see everyone, come and check us out
at at Third Hill, and just come check out Third Hill. You know, they they
make some awesome beer. And I'm not just saying that because I've had the the,
honor and privilege to brew with them, but come check us out. And if you
can't check us out, we just wanna wish all of you guys nationwide and
internationally, happy National Beer Day. That is Sunday.
Cheers. Be well, everybody. We are @DCBeer across social
media. Please do not stare directly at the eclipse without
protective eyewear. Be safe out there. See you this
weekend.