a morning with maltsters, part four

Making Malt: in the final presentation we were taken from ancient times and traditional floor malting into the present day, where modern germinating kilning vessels can make up to 500 tons of malt at a time, in a continuous batching process.

Most of the malt made in Britain is used in the brewing and distilling industries, with roughly 500,000 tons of malt each year being used by commercial brewers and 800,000 tons going to the distilleries. There are around twenty million casks of whisky maturing in the 115 distilleries around the UK. Our third speaker, Eric Walker, was a man with lots of experience in every aspect of the malting, brewing and distilling industries. He began with a quick look at making malt in the distant past, pointing out that malt has been important for a very long time.

Its' origins are lost in the mists of time.

There's a story that ancient Egyptians, around 3000 years ago, may have made their malt by putting grain into baskets, then lowering the basket into a deep well. The basket could be raised and lowered, effectively steeping the grain. It would germinate in the basket and was shaken at regular intervals to prevent the rootlets from matting. Green malt was dried in the sun. The method is described in detail here on the Briess Malt web page. I'm not so sure this was an efficient way to make large amounts of malt for brewing. Perhaps enough could be made for small scale brewing.

It would be interesting to do some experimental and practical work, to assess the validity of the idea that malt can be made in a well, using a basket. I wondered how much malt could have been made in this way. There would not be enough to supply large vats like those at Hierakonopolis, a predynastic site in Egypt, which were probably used as mash tuns.

Beer was being made here in industrial quantities.

The vats, probably mash tuns, at Hierakonopolis, Egypt. Source here

The Egyptians must have used floors for germinating the barley. A malting floor is not an obvious thing to identify in the archaeological record. All that's required is a smooth level floor surface within a building. It's something that has been overlooked in the interpretation of archaeological sites. Archaeologists don't often interpret the remains of a building as having possibly been a grain barn or a floor surface as having been being suitable for making malt.

Eric talked about malting floors and the potential evidence for the manufacture of ale in prehistory. I was rather pleased that, on his next slide, he showed some of the evidence for the making of malt and ale in Neolithic Britain. That's my research.

There is good evidence for the manufacture of malt and ale at some of the Orcadian neolithic sites, such as Skara Brae and Barnhouse, six thousand years ago. At Skara Brae there were sherds from a large 30 gallon pot found beside the central hearth. Excavated by Vere Gordon Childe in the 1930s, no residue analysis was done on these pot sherds. Its' location would be an ideal spot for a fermenting barley wort. At the site of Barnhouse, another neolithic village, there was a possible malting floor as well as many drains which are essential for a brewer. Analysis of pot sherds using the technique of Gas Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry revealed "unidentified sugars and barley lipids" in the fabric of the pottery. It's a possible indication of sparging. If they were sparging to obtain a wort then they must have been making malt and ale. 

If you want to read more about neolithic and bronze age evidence, I suggest you have a look here at an article we wrote for Orkneyjar a few years ago. It's about the prehistoric transformation of grain into ale. You'll also find links to my published academic papers and to my thesis. I know of no other archaeologists who are working on the archaeological evidence for the manufacture of barley malt and ale in the neolithic. It seems to be considered a controversial topic by some academics, or so I am told. That's why I was pleased to see my work referred to at this malting seminar. Clearly the professional maltsters, brewers and distillers have no problem with the idea.

Eric described how floor malting is labour intensive, requiring skilled and dedicated people. It was the only way of making malt until the mid 19th century. The malt must be turned and raked on the floor, as well as being moved around the maltings from steep tank to germination floor, and from there to the kiln floor. It takes many workers to make the malt.

Modern pneumatic maltings changed all of this.

Two Belgian malting engineers, Galland and Saladin, are considered to be the fathers of modern pneumatic malting. In 1873 Galland designed a system of aerated rectangular boxes. A few years later, in 1880, Saladin introduced a mechanised turning system. The new integrated system of aeration and mechanical turning of the malt by Archimedes screws was called
a saladin box.

A few Saladin boxes are in use today, this one is at Tamdu Distillery

, source here

The workers who turned the malt cannot have been happy about this. For many, it meant the loss of their job. It was, in so many ways, a revolution in the malting industry, although it took several decades, until the 1960s, before Saladin boxes became commonplace in a maltings.

The technology of making malt developed rapidly. By the early 1970s, Saladin drums were being made and used. These are far larger and capable of producing thirty to fifty tonnes of malt at a time, in a continuous batching process. They can be operated all year round, in contrast to a traditional floor maltings that were subject to weather and temperature (see previous post). Much less manpower is needed, there is a lower cost of production. They consistently produce good quality malt in the quantity that is required today in the modern brewing and distilling business.

Germinating Kilning Vessel at Crisp's Maltings, source here

Germinating Kilning Vessels, can make up to 500 tons of malt at a time. I've not yet seen a large industrial maltings and have never looked inside one of these Germinating Kilning Vessels, but here's a man who has. Jeff Evans, on his blog inside beer, describes the experience:

"I climbed the stairs of one of these enormous, modern cylindrical towers to discover vast stainless-steel steeping tanks, malting floors and kilns. Having seen the simple, homely methods of the floor maltings, the scale and functionality came as a shock. Each of the tanks handles more than ten times the amount the entire floor malting facility can process in one go. 

At the push of a few buttons, the process gets underway – steeping, germination, kilning. Such are the efficiencies that germination is a day shorter here, and kilning only takes two days. The equipment is also much easier to clean, so you can see why new technology has its supporters in the industry. 

Once malted, the grains are quickly shipped out to breweries or malt merchants. Crisp’s job is done. The brewer will ultimately claim the credit for his wonderful beer, but, as the old saying puts it, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. There’s a lot of skill and care that goes into that drink even before the brewer starts his work. 

The next time you are entranced by a hoppy aroma as you raise a pint to your lips, stop, wait and think. Look beyond the green, tangy, zesty glory boys that steal the limelight and remember the malt and the maltster, the forgotten heroes of brewing."

In his final remarks about malt and malting techniques, Eric Walker reminded us of some of the fundamental principles.

Malt is a living thing. If it is not correctly steeped it can either drown or asphyxiate. It needs careful handling. The maltsters who make malt in these large vessels take as much care of it as the traditional floor maltster, there's a whole new set of skills and knowledge involved in the craft of making huge batches of good quality malt. The maltster's rub, whereby the maltster judges when it is ready for kilning, still applies. Ancient skills and knowledge are combined with modern technology.

Malting, he said

"is a process utilised by the ancients to produce palatable alcoholic beverages: ale and beer."

I couldn't agree more.

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further reading:

Who were the first maltsters? Archaeological evidence for floor malting. 

The craft of the maltster

PS In one of my earlier blogs I've asked:  where have all the malting floors gone?

big pots: fermentation and storage

Brewing ale in Neolithic Britain - it seems to be a controversial topic among some academic archaeologists. I'm not sure what the problem is with malting and brewing ale in the neolithic era. It could be that few people understand the processes involved in the transformation of grain into malt, wort and ale.

If you have come to this page via the BBC Earth website, or from the Stone Pages, please be aware that the comments attributed to me there are wrong. I have no idea where they came from, other than as a misunderstanding. I hope for a correction in the near future but so far I am not having much success.

Roasted malts, also known as specialty malts, are a feature of modern industrial malting. I'm working on a blog about that at the moment and will post a link to it when I have completed it, hopefully before the Yule celebrations of 2016!

The last few posts have been about explaining the saccharification in the mash tun, where the crushed malt, when mixed with water and gently heated, is converted by enzymes into malt sugars. I've also written a little about lautering, sparging and how to collect the wort.

We've been asked 'why not ferment in the trough. Why go to all the trouble of trying to collect a wort without bits in it?'

Firstly, alcoholic fermentation requires anaerobic conditions. A large vat (1000s of litres) within a building has a blanket of carbon dioxide over the fermenting beer, as in lambic brewing. A small trough (100s of litres) situated outside would have this blanket blown away. Secondly, during fermentation, the little bubbles of carbon dioxide produced by the yeast, stick to the smaller particles and lift them into the froth of the barm. You can see the towering barm in the picture below. It can turn into a really messy monster when it has a lot of little bits in it. After fermentation you would still have the problem of straining or filtering what brew has not been lost to the froth-over. That is a lot harder with little bubbles in it. A bed of husks will not form properly and filtering just doesn't work. 

Inoculating the wort: starting a fermentation
Once the brewer has obtained a quantity of wort by mashing, lautering and sparging, the next stage of the brewing process is the fermentation. Whether you mash in a large pot, a wooden tub with a spigot hole, in a trough in the ground or in a modern mash tun, the wort that you make must be dealt with promptly to prevent infection setting in. Wort does not keep well. Either you boil it, as is necessary with hops, and then cool and inoculate with yeast at the right temperature. Or you can inoculate a fresh wort when it has cooled, and then add the herbs. We found that meadowsweet flowers inhibited the yeast and are better added after the fermentation. To find out more about raw ale which, basically, is beer made from an unboiled wort, I suggest a look at this blog. Raw ale is a huge topic in itself.

fermentation in close up, this is the barm (foam) on a fermenting beer

There are a number of ways of adding the yeast to the wort to start the fermentation. Today, the brewer can add yeast directly, in dried form or as a yeast starter, when the wort temperature is just right. Many modern breweries keep their yeast starter in a fridge. They scoop some of the barm (foam) from the top of the fermenting beer and then store it in a cool place until required. The yeast culture can be kept and used for several months. 

Brewers in history and prehistory could also have used this simple and basic technique, keeping their barm/yeast culture in a cool place. In the 1980s, archaeologists found a medium sized grooved ware pot which had been sunk into the ground in the remains of one of the buildings at Barnhouse, Orkney. The pot, about a litre in volume, had been buried up to its' rim. Analysis revealed that it had contained some kind of 'cereal based mixture', but they were unsure about the pot's function. I think it may have been a barm pot. It was located in a large building, numbered eight by the excavation team and interpreted as a 'temple' or some other kind of ritual building. There were drains as well as many sherds of broken or smashed Grooved Ware pottery, representing pots of about one litre in volume. There was also evidence of feasting and what archaeologists refer to as 'ritual activity', although what that was is not made clear in the excavation report.

I would say that if an archaeologist is looking for a prehistoric ritual activity then the mysterious and magical transformation of grain into malt, wort and ale is well worth considering.

In Norway, Lithuania, Latvia and other places, the tradition of making farmhouse ale survives, with brewers passing on their skills, techniques and knowledge to their descendants. Old traditions of inoculating the wort are still practised in several areas of northern Europe. The picture below shows a wooden yeast ring or kveikering being used to inoculate a yeast starter.

wooden yeast ring or kveikering (photo from the beer blog of Lars Garshol)

Some sources say that the tradition of the kveikering dates back to the 18th century, although I wonder whether the concept might date even further back. It's difficult to be sure because, of course, a wooden object used to gather yeast and start a fermentation would not survive in the archaeological record. In the Viking era, apparently, a stick was used to stir the fermenting wort. This would put yeast onto the stick. Then, if it was kept dry, it could be used to start the next fermentation by stirring a fresh wort. In the Western Isles of Scotland there is a tradition of stirring the fermenting beer with a hazel stick (or wand) which is then hung up to dry and used to stir the next batch of wort, to begin the fermentation.

We did some experiments using a wooden spoon and found that this technique works perfectly.

harvesting barm from the fermentation vessel

barm/yeast drying on the wooden spoon (more photos here)

Big pots as fermentation and storage vessels.
The neolithic era was the time of the 'first farmers'. The earliest grain agriculturalists of the British Isles (c4000BC onwards) were also the megalith builders. They created magnificent stone circles and henges as gathering places for the community. They built stone tombs for their dead and they began to settle down. Associated with the 'first farmers' is the integrated 'cultural package' of grain cultivation, the management of domesticated animals (cows, sheep, goats and pigs) and the manufacture of ceramics. This was the 'neolithic revolution', a different lifestyle to the mesolithic hunter gatherers who had roamed the land for thousands of years previously. At this time in prehistory, the technology for making large stave built wooden vessels (vats, tubs, barrels) did not exist.

How did these neolithic 'first farmers' process their grain? Were they grinding it into flour, to make bread? Were they boiling it, making some kind of gruel or porridge? Or were they making ale from it, by malting, mashing, sparging and fermentation? For some reason, the possibility that such a thing as ale in the neolithic is considered to be a controversial idea by many archaeologists. I'm not sure why. 

Some of the large neolithic Grooved Ware pots might have been used as fermentation vessels. They are perfect in both shape and size. One particularly large Grooved Ware pot found at the neolithic village of Skara Brae, Orkney, was around 30 gallons in volume. Most of the large Grooved Ware pots were around eight to ten gallons. They are found at many ritual and feasting sites of the neolithic, in domestic contexts, for example at Skara Brae, Orkney, and at stone circles and henge monuments throughout the British Isles.

What is Grooved Ware? It is neolithic pottery that archaeologists have defined by its' decorative pattern of grooves and shapes on the exterior. Not all grooved ware has grooves; some of it has fancy applied decoration, with blobs of clay and raised patterns. Most Grooved Ware pots are bucket shaped, with a flat bottom. They are found throughout the British Isles, from Clacton to Orkney and Shetland and also in Ireland. Indeed, this style of pottery was first called 'Rinyo-Clacton Ware'. Rinyo being the name of a site on one of the Orkney islands, Rousay. It was a neolithic village larger than Skara Brae. Grooved Ware was also found on the south coast, at Lion Point near Clacton.

Here's one of Stuart Piggott's beautiful and classic drawings of British Neolithic pottery, showing what some of the Grooved Ware pots from the south coast probably looked like, based upon sherds found during excavations on the Essex coast, at Lion Point.

 

Pottery is frequently found during archaeological excavations. Archaeologists regard it as diagnostic. The discovery and identification of a sherd of pottery gives them a good clue about the date of the site. Neolithic and Bronze Age pottery was not glazed. It could have been waterproofed in several ways, by burnishing or by being sealed with fats, beeswax or milk.

a sherd of grooved ware

Pottery typologies are complex. It's an enormous area of archaeological study and I could not possibly go into every style and type of British Neolithic pottery in this blog. We would be here forever. There's Windmill Hill, Grimston-Lyles Hill Ware, Ronaldsway, Grooved Ware, Unstan Ware, Peterborough Ware, Ebbsfleet and so the list goes on. Most are round bottomed pots, with the exception of Grooved Ware. It took me many months to get to grips with these stylistic categorisations that have been imposed upon pottery of 5000 years ago.

Many bowl shaped pots are interpreted as 'cooking pots'. That seems fairly reasonable. What puzzles me is that whenever archaeologists find a very large pot, or the sherds of a large flat bottomed bucket shaped pot, it is almost always interpreted as a 'storage pot'. I have not yet come across a large pot from the British Neolithic that has been interpreted as a potential fermentation vessel, although some of them have a volume of several gallons and such large pots are often found at feasting sites, for example, at Durrington Walls, near Stonehenge.

If an earthenware pot is to be used to contain any liquid it must be waterproofed. We discovered, in our mashing and fermenting experiments, that beeswax worked very well as a sealant, as did butter and lard.

As a control experiment we tried fermenting mead in an untreated earthenware pot. The fermentation worked well, the room filled with the smell of mead, and the outside surface of the pot was covered in little beads of sticky sweetness. But the final product was disappointingly low in alcohol. It turns out that the alcohol diffuses through the porous pot much faster than the honey solution. This makes an untreated pot pretty useless for creating an alcoholic drink.

Here is a sample of some of the British Neolithic pottery types, as recorded by Stuart Piggott. You can see that there is a wide range of styles. Some have holes in the rim, to secure a covering or lid of, perhaps, leather. Some are deep, others are wide and shallow. I prefer to look at these pots with function in mind, rather than consider only their decoration and style.

Is there any archaeological evidence for the use of large pots for the fermentation or storage of barley wort? 
One of the very best indicators that a pot was used to ferment wort into ale, or for storing the ale, is the identification of beerstone on the internal surface. Beerstone precipitates out of a fermenting barley wort, it looks rather like eggshell. We have a lot of it accumulating on our plastic fermentation buckets and storage vessels.

It takes many hundreds of uses to accumulate a visible deposit of beerstone, but it is a certain proof of fermented wort. Brewers using plastic pipes in breweries often have to clean them of an accumulation of beerstone. It clogs the pipes.

Here is some beerstone from one of our fermentation vessels:

Beerstone has been identified on pots from a Bronze Age site in the Zagros mountains of modern day Iran. At excavations at Godin Tepe a great many pots and jars were discovered, they were stored in the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Subsequent analysis of a yellowish deposit on the internal surface of jars identified beerstone and it is generally accepted as unequivocal evidence for beer brewing. This pioneering paper by Badler, Michel and McGovern, published in 1993, tells the whole story and contains sufficient detail to be able to repeat the tests for beerstone on prehistoric pottery.

I wonder whether any archaeologists in the UK or Europe would consider looking for beerstone on big prehistoric pots? Maybe it is already being investigated. It would be great if this could happen, since this might end the apparent controversy about whether or not a big old pot was used for the fermentation of beer made from a barley wort.

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If you would like to make your own kveikering, here is some more information  and details of how to make one. Brewer Martin Warren of the Poppyland Brewery was so impressed by the idea that he made his own.

My conference paper from 1996 "Neolithic Ale: Barley as a source of sugars for fermentation" can be downloaded from my Academia page, here.