It’s January 2024 and I’m on the train back to my new home in Norwich. It’s a cold, blue day, and winter light fills the carriage. I look up from my laptop and see that we’re speeding past a beautiful lake, the sun shimmering on its surface. I knew about the Norfolk Broads, but I never knew about lakes like this!

Quickly, I stab at my phone and bring up Google Maps. I want to see exactly where we are so I can bring Liz back here for a lakeside picnic in the summer. When the app responds, I’m momentarily disorientated. The blue dot informs me that my immediate location is surrounded not by blue, but green and gold. This is not a lake. It is—or was—farmland. Somewhere under all that water is what was supposed to be the 2024 winter barley crop.

North Norfolk is, hands down, the best location for growing malting barley in the world. The North Sea haar blows in and cools the fields in summer, which extends the growing season and gives plumper grains that yield more fermentable sugars. The region is home to Maris Otter, the barley variety most beloved by ale brewers. I’ve seen sacks of East Anglia-malted Maris Otter proudly displayed in breweries from Melbourne to California. On my train, I wonder if there’ll be enough for that this year.

Photography kindly supplied by Loughran Brewers Select

Barley has two different, overlapping growing seasons. Winter barley is sown between September and November, takes longer to grow, and is harvested in the second half of July. Spring barley is sown between February and May and harvested in August and September. Because of its longer growing season, winter barley tends to produce higher yields, but it requires more fertiliser and attention. Spring barley is easier and, obviously, quicker to grow, but yields may not be as great. So, if you’re in the business of malting barley for brewing, it’s a good idea to spread your bets between the two. That is, until your winter barley—which favours drier, warmer conditions—is completely under water.

When the figures for the 2024 UK crop harvest are published by the Department for the Environment Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) nine months later, the impact of these impromptu East Anglian lakes is confirmed: the winter barley harvest is down by 26% versus the equivalent yield in 2023, and 18% adrift of the average for the last five years.

Thankfully, spring barley saved the day: up 41% on 2023, this year saw the third biggest crop recorded this century. “The weather meant it was a very late sowing for spring barley this year, which meant a short growing season,” Will Durrant tells me. “Here we are at the end of August and it’s only just been harvested. It’s probably had a month shorter growing time than it’s used to. But somehow, it’s caught up with where it needs to be.”

Will is General Manager at Baird’s Maltings in Witham, Essex. I know better than to try and engage him on the subject of climate change while we’re speaking on the record—such discussions are perhaps best left for the pub. I haven’t met a single person who works in agriculture or food production over the last ten years who doesn’t believe it’s happening, or that it’s already having a profound effect on our food supply chain.

Will is showing me around the maltings complex, which stands just by the station in Witham, a small town in north Essex surrounded by more of that green and gold farmland—for now, at least.

I love old factories like this. As I left the train just a few yards away, the complex reminded me, as maltings always do, of some fantastical half-imagined vision from a Ridley Scott film. There’s a red-brick monolith several storeys high with no windows in its main wall. White towers dwarf what, in their own right, are tall and sometimes fat corrugated iron cylinders, with gantries running up and down and round their perimeters. Something that looks like a watchtower from a World War II Prisoner of War camp. I imagine that if the day ever comes when it’s no longer needed as a maltings, the complex could be used as the location for a climactic gun battle before exploding in a fireball as the hero makes it out just in time.

““Malting is about getting the barley to do what it wants to do in the field, but on our terms.””

— Will Durrant, Bairds Malt

There’s not much chance of that right now though. Since Baird’s parent company was acquired by the France-based Malteries Soufflet in November 2023, it’s now part of the largest malting group in the world, which produces 3.7 million tonnes of malt a year, almost 15% of the world’s malt supply. Baird’s, which was founded by two Glaswegian brothers in 1823, focuses mainly on supplying malt to the distilling industry, with four maltings in Scotland. But Witham, its only English facility, focuses on brewing malt. It produces around 48,000 tonnes of base, pale malt a year, which supply brewers large and small both in the UK and around the world. But it also produces around 8000 tonnes of roasted, coloured malts a year too. And these are of particular interest to small brewers looking to make more interesting, flavourful beers.

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It's astonishing that, as beer drinkers and beer lovers, we don’t know more about malt. In 2016, after writing about beer for over a decade, I decided to learn more about it for my book Miracle Brew, a deep dive into the four main ingredients of beer. At the start of my research, I resolved to try to forget everything I thought I knew about malt, and come at it fresh. It was good that I did: most of what I thought I knew turned out to be nonsense. Suddenly, the slightly pained looks of some brewers in rooms where I’d been giving talks made sense.

Malt, above anything else, is what gives us beer. Hops are far more celebrated. But you can have beer without hops. Malt is what beer is actually made from. And the beguiling thing about it is, you can’t just grow it. The amount of skill and effort needed to turn fresh barley into malted barley is extraordinary.

“Malting is about getting the barley to do what it wants to do in the field, but on our terms,” Will says.

That’s a neat summary. But trying to get the better of nature, trying to out-think her or trick her, rarely ends well. We humans have been learning how to malt barley for about 10,000 years. We’re only now just about getting the hang of it.

In malting, there are two basic principles at play: controlling the amount of water in the grain, and controlling the temperature it’s exposed to.

When freshly harvested barley arrives at the maltings, every batch is tested for purity, infection and so on. It then has to be stored—it could be kept for some months before being malted—and storage means a temperature of less than fifteen degrees Celsius and a moisture content of no more than 12%. (Depending on the location and the weather, it can be anywhere from 18 to 15% when it’s harvested.)

When it’s time to malt the grain, it goes through several key stages:

1. Steeping

The reason the new barley grain needs to be stored cool and dry is that the last thing you want is for it to germinate. That is, until you really want it to germinate.

Grains such as barley are like a well-armoured Saturn rocket. The capsule is the grain embryo, kept in a kind of suspended animation until the conditions are right for it to grow and prosper. The rest of it is fuel, in the form of starch. As starch, it’s not much use as food to anyone: this is a second line of protection to keep the food for the embryo when it needs it. The first line of defence is the rock-hard outer shell, known as the bran. The bran and the starch keep the fuel safe until the grain needs it. So, the first stage of malting is to trick the grain into the thinking that time is now. This, says Will, is the most important part of the process that the maltster can influence to create high quality malt.

First, the barley is washed. Then it sits in water for up to 48 hours until its moisture content comes up from the 12% that it was stored at to around 43-44%. It’s not a question of simply letting it sit in the water: this could drown the grain. So there’s a careful process of wet immersions followed by partial drying periods – a bit like waterboarding, only nice. This takes about two days. Baird’s can steep up to 170 tonnes of grain at a time, in six large, stainless steel circular vessels in which paddles gently stir the grain to ensure an even hydration.

2. Germination

The point of steeping the grain is getting it to the point where it wants to germinate. From a grain-eyed point of view, if it’s wet and warm, it’s time for the seed to sprout, and when it does so, it’s going to need a lot of energy to grow. The hard bran wall softens, so that the new seedling can push through it. At the same time, the grain releases enzymes that prepare to “modify” the starch. Imagine sugar as a pile of bricks: each one can be picked up and eaten by the hungry grain. But as starch, it’s a brick wall. Modification of the starch involves “softening the mortar” that holds the bricks in place, ready for it to fall apart into digestible chunks.

From a maltster’s-eye view, it’s all a big trick designed to con the barley out of its sugary stash. The grain is spread out into a flat bed. Germinating grain creates heat, so the temperature needs to be carefully controlled. The grain thinks it’s doing this in a field rather than tightly packed bed. The burst of emerging rootlets can tangle and mat the grain together.

For these two reasons, the grain bed has to be regularly turned, releasing the heat build-up and preventing the grain from tangling. This is the part that gives malting its traditional image. Pre-industrialisation, the grain bed could only be around three inches thick. The heat build-up would otherwise get too unpredictable. And dragging a rake through even a few inches of grain is a lot more physically demanding than it looks.

““The weather changes. The seasons change. But we don’t notice any difference by the time it gets to us.””

— Alex Bragg, Three Blind Mice Brewery

That’s why traditional floor maltings were huge spaces, football field-sized floors under stone arches, perforated floor tiles allowing airflow, and men in flat caps and braces dragging rakes to create even furrows whose neat order would shame a country cricket groundsman. Such floor maltings took up a huge amount of space, which is why, now they’re no longer around, there are so many recently-built housing developments and cul-de-sacs across the country named “The Maltings” in their memory.

There are still a few floor maltings left dotted around the UK. Crisp, up the road in North Norfolk, has one, and a tour of Warminster’s traditional maltings in Wiltshire should be on every serious beer fan’s bucket list. Baird’s Witham plant began life as a floor maltings. But today, germination here takes place in four stainless steel, circular vessels. They’re not as romantic or “crafty” as floor maltings, but in action, they are truly awesome and mesmeric to watch. With the power and fine calibration of modern technology, the grain bed is now two metres deep. A rotating arm sweeps from the centre to the perimeter, filling the cylinder with grain. Attached to the bottom of this arm, giant circular screws turn the hot, damp grain constantly. This process will continue for four days. I stand on an observation platform at the rim of the vessel, watching everything turn. The air is full of hot mist. A sample of grain, taken from the bed, shows that it can now be crushed between your fingernails to reveal smears of chalky, soft starch. Rootlets cover the grains like stringy blond hair.

3. Kilning

Left to their own devices, the barley grains would now continue trying to grow into new plants. Instead, kilning turns them into the basis of beer. Kilning is where the grain is heated to kill off the poor baby embryo just as it was getting into its groove. But we don’t want to kill off the enzymes that are poised to modify the starch into sugars that yeast could ferment, now there’s no baby barley grain to eat them. So in the first instance, kilning stabilises the enzymes and brings the germination process to a halt.

This happens in yet more stainless-steel drums. This time, the grain is laid out in a bed one metre thick. A gas-fired kiln breathes warm air through this bed for 19 hours within a 24-hour cycle. Apart from ending germination, it also gently cooks the malt, giving it colour and flavour. A few days ago, trying to bite into this grain would have yielded nothing except maybe some cracked tooth enamel. Now, it tastes crunchy and sweet. This is white malt, or pale malt. It’s full of starch that will be converted into fermentable sugar when milled and mixed with hot water. It also gives the base flavour for lager or pale ale.

4. Roasting

Over 80% of the malt in any beer, even an imperial stout, is pale malt. It has to be: if you cook the malt too much, you kill off the enzymes that convert starch to sugar, and there’s no fermentable sugar, so no alcohol. But if you roast the grains further, causing them to caramelise and colour almost to the point of burning, the palate of flavours that can be provided by malt opens up like a magician’s fan of playing cards. From a base digestive biscuit character, the two roasters at Baird’s—named, obviously, Roaster Three and Roaster Four—create the malts that give toffee, chocolate, red berry fruit, even tobacco and coffee grounds.

“Roasting occurs at 230 degrees, and the temperature for auto-ignition of the grain is 232 degrees. So you’re right on the edge,” Will says.

The risk of the air literally combusting used to be a common risk in a maltings. Thankfully, due to the advent of modern technology, it’s not so much any more.

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Three Blind Mice Brewery have been making beer in Ely, Cambridgeshire, since 2014. They’ve always used Baird’s for their malt because Witham is only thirty miles away, and particularly rely on them for the dark speciality malts from roasters Three and Four. “We’re looking for flavour,” Alex Bragg, one of the Three Blind Mice, tells me. “It’s all about variety, just like hops. With speciality malts we like to try anything new. Red rye and spelt malts are interesting just now.”

Three Blind Mice Beers are in all the good pubs in Norwich this year. Alex tells me that “it’s all hoppy and hazy in Norwich,” but I manage to find a pint of their Old Brown Mouse Best Bitter, a classic, old-school cask ale at 4.2% ABV. It uses Baird’s Crystal, Cara and Chocolate malts as well as the base pale. The colour is a deep ruby, the shade the dimpled pint jug was invented to refract. It’s not in-your-face —it’s not meant to be. But there’s soft caramel and toffee and light forest fruit, gently tempered by the light bitterness of hops, but provided by the malts.

“As well as flavour, we’re looking for consistency. It has to do the same thing every time,” Alex says. “The weather changes. The seasons change. But we don’t notice any difference by the time it gets to us.”

Here, then, is the end result of all that obsessive measurement and close observation, the constant adding and subtracting of moisture and heat. Climate, temperature and rainfall have a profound effect on the grain harvest, and their mood swings are only getting worse. Malted barley may never have the seductive charisma of hops—I can’t imagine there are many brewers or beer geeks getting tattoos of their favourite malted grain any time soon.

But this “raw ingredient” in beer has been on quite a journey before it even gets to the brewery. That journey is going to get rockier, more random and more difficult over the coming years. Ensuring that, at the end of this journey, brewers like Alex continue to see no difference in the bedrock ingredient of their beers is, in the immortal words of Self Esteem, some kind of fucking wizardry.