Much of Caleb Michalke’s life revolves around smoke. It’s a substance, a multi-sensory ensemble, that clearly compels him in his daily work as the owner of Sugar Creek Malt in western Indiana.

It’s unlikely anyone was begging him for his array of malts cold-smoked over herbs like lavender or tarragon or hot-smoked over dozens of different woods. Some, like oak and beechwood, are pretty standard. But lemonwood? Persimmon? Tabasco barrels? Those choices are clearly driven by something deeper, something beyond a balance sheet. Call it a lonely impulse of delight, but it motivates much of Caleb’s tinkering.

Inside a makeshift business office in a converted shed on a cold January day, Caleb shows me a shelf lined with Mason jars containing some of his more unusual malts. The lavender smoked malt smells of lemon, tea, and oatmeal. The chocolate rice tastes like hot cocoa powder.

These more esoteric malts don’t keep the lights on at Sugar Creek though, as most of the 25,000 bushels of malt produced here every year are dictated by the production needs of customers.

“With everyone doing hazies, we do a lot of oats now,” explains Caleb. “Three years ago, no one wanted oats. Now everybody does.”

While Sugar Creek provides malt for a number of prominent regional breweries, including Three Floyds, Half Acre, and Upland, he’s been shifting toward supplying a larger number of smaller breweries and brewpubs rather than a few bigger ones (he worked with one hundred breweries exactly in 2019).

“All the malting barley grown in Indiana comes to us, and we only need about 250 acres worth annually,” he explains. That works out to about 25,000 [US] bushels per year, or about one million pounds (412,000 metric tons) of finished malt. That might sound like a lot, but it’s a tiny fraction of what the major malting companies produce.

“We want to be small enough that we can experiment, but big enough to keep up with customer needs,” Caleb tells me. “We’re getting in there and touching and moving the grain by hand every day. It’s hard work.”

He grew up on a row-crop farm just across the field, and after graduating from Purdue University with a degree in animal science and agricultural economics, he taught high school farming classes for a couple of years before feeling a call back to the land.

“I never really saw myself farming again,” he says as we sit down for coffee before the workday begins. “But I realised I missed that life.”

He became interested in beer ingredients through homebrewing and realised there was no one malting barley in the entire state. After training in North Dakota and Manitoba, Canada, he began malting in 2015.

““We want to be small enough that we can experiment, but big enough to keep up with customer needs.””

— Caleb Michalke, Sugar Creek Malt

“There’s really no books you can order for how to do this right,” he reflects. “We made a lot of mistakes that first year. We still make mistakes.”

Call it Midwestern humility, because Sugar Creek Malt is doing a lot of things right.

Averie Swanson—who served as head brewer at Jester King Brewery in Texas before moving to Chicago and launching her own beer brand called Keeping Together—has long been fascinated by smoked beers. She was eager to try Sugar Creek’s unusual malts when she moved to the Midwest. The lavender-smoked malt especially intrigued her.

“The smoke character was quite delicate and the lavender added these lovely floral top notes to the aroma,” she explains. She decided to brew a beer entirely designed around this malt. It’s still in the tank currently, but she says early samples have been exciting.

“It has transformed quite a bit through fermentation; the smoke character is front and centre, but it has so many layers,” she says. “It reminds me of a high elevation Tobalá mezcal with savoury flavours of terracotta earth and faint cinnamon spice under delicate top notes of white flowers and mint.”

***

Just outside the office sits Sugar Creek’s drum roaster, which Caleb built himself from some steel barrels. The fire risk involved in heating grain to over 400° F (204.4°C) led him to house the roaster in an enclosed trailer rather than any of the permanent farm buildings.

“To order one from Germany would have cost around $1 million (£800,000),” he explains as he dumps 50 lb. (approx. 23kg) sacks of malt into the roaster. “From the one U.S. company that makes them, it was about $150,000 (£120,000). This cost me about $10,000 (£8,000), trailer included.”

He’s making chocolate malt today, and once the roaster is loaded, he lights the burners and starts the motor to rotate the drums. It hums throughout the day as he returns to douse it with moisture periodically and check on its progress.

It’s the tangible elements of his work that clearly keep Caleb doing this day after day. His senses are drenched in the sights, smells, textures, flavours, and even sounds of malting throughout the day and night, an evocative and complex tapestry of stimuli. As the chocolate malt slowly roasts, notes of caramel, toffee, and cinnamon radiate out and settle over the farmyard.

“Out here by the roaster early on a winter morning, before sunrise, those smells, and that warmth…,” he trails off. “It’s nice.”

***

Built into the side of a small hill on Caleb’s farm is a såinnhus, a Norwegian smokehouse in which the malt-drying bed rests directly above the wood fires. The bed is made from boards—in this case pine—with countless holes drilled in them to allow rising smoke to permeate the drying malt. Caleb can use different types of wood to create malts saturated with unique smoke aromas.

When Caleb began producing malt at Sugar Creek, he’d only ever read about a såinnhus. His initial goal was just to produce consistent malt for regional craft brewers and distillers, but blogs by Lars Marius Garshol and Mika Laitinen led him to explore this unusual bit of brewing history. Now he operates the only one in North America.

As Caleb leads the way to the small building, the sweet, plummy smell of cherrywood smoke fills the chilly air. He splits some cherry logs for the fires, and we open the door to a more intense, spicy smoke. Inside, burlap sacks of malt are steeping in a stone basin, and a shallow bed of malt is drying on the concrete floor. Caleb swings back the sliding doors into the smoke room itself and climbs a ladder to check on the malt currently drying over the fires.

“Oh yeah, that’s almost ready,” he observes as he turns the bed with a pitchfork. The current batch is Carinthian oats, a variety with history not in Norway but in southern Austria, close to the Italian border.

“They used to make this raw ale made with 100% smoked oats in Austria back in the 1800s,” he explains. “They’d filter it through juniper too. Everything you think of as Nordic was being done all over.”

He says these techniques get associated with Nordic climes because that’s the only area where the traditions have been preserved, but they were once the norm across Europe.

In 2019, Caleb, his wife Whitney and their young son visited Norway to see the different types of såinnhus currently in use. After the obligatory visit to Hornindal, they spent time in Stjørdal and the island of Tautra.

“The Norwegians are glad to see this surviving,” he says when I ask what they thought of an American recreating their traditions in the New World. “Ten years ago, they thought we were all a bunch of hillbillies making moonshine, but now they’re excited about what we’re doing.”

Before we leave, he lays a hand reverentially on the thick wood beams that frame the doorway to the smoke room.

“This whole thing is a bit of my past,” he reflects. “These beams are from a barn that fell down on my grandpa’s property. The tin roof is from another barn. These doors are from a cabin in northern Wisconsin that had been in my family since the 1920s. We had to sell it when my grandmother passed.”

The doors don’t match the room. Their wood is a smooth, yellow cream with glass panels and Victorian glass rosette handles. The old key is still in the lock, though it’s no longer needed. Caleb slides the doors shut and we step back outside.

““It’s like when you put your head over a raging wood fire—it fills your entire palate.””

— Marika Josephson, Scratch Brewing

Caleb plans to follow the seasons with his use of the såinnhus. In the spring, he’ll shift to Baltic-style oven malts rather than Nordic smoked malts. In the summer, he’ll wind dry malts on the roof.

“Everybody’s trying to reproduce all these old beer styles, but you can’t do that with modern ingredients,” he observes.

That’s a thought Chris Schooley at Troubadour Maltings in Colorado echoes.

“We craft maltsters are in a place where we get to explore historical and traditional methods,” Chris says. “We're not just trying to make ‘local’ versions of malts you can already get somewhere else for much cheaper. It's about rediscovering forgotten malts and developing new ones. We’ve seen that from Sugar Creek with their development of old world-style techniques.”

Scratch Brewing in neighbouring southern Illinois now uses Sugar Creek malts exclusively, and while that means using a lot of Caleb’s base malts, this brewery focusing on foraged and locally harvested ingredients also uses many of his more exotic offerings, especially those from the såinnhus.

Co-founder and brewer Marika Josephson brewed a beer with 100% såinnhus malts and it was so intense, she decided to try an experiment: she brewed a beer with only 1% såinnhus malt, and it was still noticeably smoky.

“This malt has a depth of smoke I’ve never tasted before,” she explains. “Lots of smoky beers come across like bacon or barnyard to me, but this doesn’t come across that way at all. It’s like when you put your head over a raging wood fire—it fills your entire palate.”

***

Throughout my day at Sugar Creek, Caleb will often pause wherever we are to comment on the changing smells of his malt, the shifting quality of the smoke—here more sharp, there sweeter and subtly spicy. He’s an artist working in smoke, and he’s fascinated by the colours he’s had a hand in creating.

Near the end of the day, he checks the temperature of the chocolate malt one last time before killing the burners and dumping the coffee-hued malt into a false-bottomed cooling basin. The smell is rich and luxurious.

“I love chocolate malt days,” he says with a boyish grin, smoothing out the bed of malt as it radiates heat into our chilled faces. “I’ll smell that on my clothes all evening.”

Later, as I drive home across the empty winter fields, I smell it on my own jacket and smile. I can understand why Caleb still isn’t numb to it.

“You can talk about terroir, but it’s really more about process,” Caleb had told me as we’d talked about his more unique malts. “You can take one grain and make a hundred different things from it. That’s the heart and the romance for me.”