Brewing malts

Malt, the semi-finished product of germinating barley or wheat, is the raw material of brewing. The brewing industry is made up of ever larger and more complex plants, for which the supply of malt is one of the most decisive factors in beer quality.

As a result, the brewery demands that malt conform to all its specifications, in a regular and homogeneous way. This is no easy task, given the variability of agricultural products due to soil and climate conditions that fluctuate from year to year and from region to region. For the maltster, it's all about harnessing and understanding this variability.

Working in partnership with breeders on raw materials, monitoring and advising on cultivation, and geological and climatic knowledge of our limited supply areas are not enough. We also need to master our processes, because even temperature and humidity (important parameters in the malting process) fluctuate from one day to the next, forcing the production manager to adapt; he has to measure and understand these fluctuations. To do this, he needs to accumulate reliable data and numerous high-performance tools to process them, all the more so as quality will only be measured on the finished product, and in-process corrections are no 100% guarantee of good malt quality. This phenomenon is becoming even more widespread today, as maltsters have had to modify their processing tools to make them more economically efficient, resulting in ever-increasing quantities of raw material being used.

France has become the world leader in malting engineering, and is also a major malt producer, exporting 1 million tonnes of malt every year to every continent.