Malt & Grain

Beer begins with barley that is allowed to germinate. This malting process converts the starch in the grain into sugar, which the yeast later ferments. The grain is then dried on a kiln, a heated floor or oven, and the hotter it gets, the darker and more roasted the malt will taste.

The Musée Français de la Brasserie houses a reconstructed 18th-century malthouse, complete with germination floor and kiln. It shows just how much manual labor went into every sack of malt before machines took over.

Lorraine is farmland, and barley has grown here for a long time. Reports from the region describe a revival of small breweries that is also boosting the cultivation of malting barley. How much of that actually ends up in their beers depends on the individual brewery.

A pale lager needs a pale, mildly kilned malt. It gives the beer a straw-to-golden color and a bready, slightly sweet base note that stays in the background. Dark malts would only come into play for beers with caramel or roasted notes.

If you visit a brewery, it's worth asking about the malt. Some operations don't malt their own grain and instead buy it ready-made from a maltster. For the flavor, that matters far less than the variety and the kilning temperature.

The brewery in Champigneulles operates at a scale that makes in-house malting long since uneconomical. With a capacity of four million hectoliters, you need to buy malt in quantities that require entire fields to grow. Proximity to the field remains an advantage for the small breweries around Nancy.