As Skagit Malting Exits, Cascadia Malts Debuts

My post lamenting the collapsing craft malt market in the Pacific Northwest was mere hours old when a fellow named Corey Freuen reached out via email. “I have been starting a malting company for the last 5 years or so,” he wrote. “And we are finally operational.” He wondered if I’d like to discuss it further. I would!

Corey is a member of an extended family farming on Washington’s east side, and he has been planning to launch his craft malthouse, Cascadia Malts, for a loooooooong time. We did speak, and not only is he excited about his new malthouse—one successful batch old the day we spoke—but he is nowhere near as bleak about the prospects for small-scale maltings as I was following Skagit’s abrupt closure. Corey gave me an overview of Cascadia (great name) and explained why he’s bullish about the future.

In the Beginning

Corey Freuen’s family settled in central Washington in the 1870s and are still farming there. He was raised in Spokane, but has always had a connection to the farming side of the family, now located in Moses Lake and Rosalia. “I wanted to find a way to be involved with the family farm,” he said. His first thought was starting a brewery that used estate malts from the family. He took up homebrewing, but a brewery didn’t seem quite right. Instead, he started to tinker with home-malting. It was unsophisticated, “Google-taught, using Rubbermaid bins and drying it in food dehydrators,” as he described it. But it did strike an important chord for him. This was before craft malting had achieved much momentum in the US, and he was sensitive to the disconnect between brewing and agriculture. An idea germinated (sorry!) in his mind, and he thought it would be great to use his family grain and start making local malt for Northwest breweries.

Corey went to Virginia Tech to learn how to malt professionally, and then began planning his own maltings. “I thought of floor-malting initially,” he said. But in the process of building the business, investors suggested the financials penciled out better with a pneumatic system. In early 2020, he’d funded the project and began construction. That was, of course, just as Covid hit. “I had carefully assembled all of our financial information and all of our cost projections, and all of those things just blew up.” Had the timing worked out differently, he might have scrapped the plan—but he was already too far in. “Halfway through construction we ran out of money, but we were far enough along in the process that there was no way I could pull the plug. At a certain point, fabricators would no longer show up, so my father-in-law and I went and got training and built the damn thing ourselves. It’s been a long, difficult process.”

Happily, he did finish the project, and as we spoke ten days ago, he’d just finished the first batch of malt on the system.

The Barley and System

“Our farm is our biggest asset,” Corey said when I asked about the barley he’ll use. His cousins run McKay Seed Company, and he has a ready supply of different barley varieties and, if he needs them, wheat. “AAC Connect is in my silo right now. I’ve got Lacey in my other silo right now.” His cousin Michael McKay is a breeder and is currently running trials for new varieties. “We do have the ability to offer things nobody else can.” Beyond the more standard commercial varieties, the McKays also do heritage grains.

This gets to questions philosophical and commercial; a malthouse may produce malts suited for different kinds of beer, malts that are more or less assertive, and malts in different forms (base and specialty). He’s trying to figure out what the market really demands. “Do I want to try a hundred different things and never master anything, or do I want to stick to like five different varieties and really dial them in and consistently produce a high-quality product?” he asked. He pointed out that while being able to offer variety is nice, he also wants to focus and offer customers what they want. “We’re expecting it to be a more flavorful version of those classic two-row mainstays without sacrificing much from the performance end.”

One of his investors is a founder of Carolina Malts, and Freuen was impressed with their Carolina Gold malt. “We’ll be using a variety of barley my cousin had picked out called Claymore. It’s got some parentage from Copeland, so it has some high-performing malting characteristics, but it also has some parentage with that Baronesse barley that LINC made pretty famous. Before we do the dehydration phase of kilning, we do some stewing, so it develops some real sweetness. It’s actually a lot like Maris Otter. So we’re going to make a ‘Cascadia Gold.’”

He drew up plans for a 10-ton system, which would be a batch size of 20,000 pounds. There’s always loss in the process, so the finished malt comes out 15% lower. In a happy accident, however, his system is not quite that size. When they finished the build-out themselves, Corey and his father-in-law made it a bit larger, so now they expect it to yield around 20,000 pounds of finished malt per batch.

How much malt is that? It’s pretty small. Corey said that if everything was absolutely humming, he could expect to do 1.2 batches a week, or around 1.2 million pounds a year. I dug around to try to figure out how that translates to beer, and an oldish Brewers Association survey reported that members were using an average of 68.7 pounds of malt per barrel. That means Corey’s annual supply is the equivalent of about 18,000 barrels of beer. Even at maximum capacity, Cascadia will be a small affair.

He was pleased to see the system worked with the first batch. Unlike breweries, which have official launches keyed to first-beer releases, Cascadia Malts has had a softer debut. Corey has already taken orders from a distillery that will keep him busy, and he’s going to brew soon with Dru Ernst of Dru Bru—a college friend. When I asked if his “malt for sale” sign was out, he laughed and said he guessed so.

Bullish About Craft Malt

Corey is obviously aware of the issues in craft malt, but he sees no reason why small malthouses can’t be successful elements in the craft beer ecosystem. We talked a bit off-record about Skagit and some of the other difficulties malthouses have encountered, and he recognizes that commodity malt is always going to be a cheaper alternative than his small-scale family malt. But like craft beer itself, it’s a specialty arena, and he sees plenty of room for new entrants.

I was reminded of the early days of craft brewing as I listened to Corey talk. It’s still a frontier out there. It’s fun and exciting to be on the vanguard of a new industry, but that also means there are no blueprints, and new malthouses are figuring it out as they go along. Perhaps Cascadia Malts is arriving at the right time—early enough to be an exciting alternative, but late enough to see some of the dangers.

“I excited to be able to support these industries. When I was getting into it, I loved how collaborative everybody was. I know there are competitive spirits out there, but when I go to conferences and stuff, everybody was so collaborative. They didn’t seem threatened by new people entering the market. At the end of the day, we’re not really competing against each other—we’re competing against the big commodity-level stuff. The more of us that are doing a good job, the more it’s easy for us to go out and gain acceptance.”

It’s certainly good news for breweries dismayed by the loss of Mecca Grade and Skagit. While Cascadia is presently no threat to replace Great Western, it does give breweries an option for local, characterful malts. Its arrival, moreover, signals that there’s life yet in small-scale malting.