Image: Most of what Colorado Malting Company produces falls into your standard fare: wheat and barley. But owner Jason Cody had started tapping into specialty grains too like locally grown quinoa and millet, which is essentially bird feed, shown here.
How does a new craft brewer stand apart from the pack? A few have hitched their brewery onto the local food bandwagon. Sourcing the ingredients that form beer’s DNA straight from the fields around them.
Last year, more than 400 breweries opened nationwide. It shouldn’t surprise that the craft beer industry is growing at a tremendous rate. In Colorado, there are so many craft breweries they’re starting to blend together.
Kyle Carbaugh’s Wiley Brewing Company is half-finished. Right now it’s just bare floors, a framed bar, and four industrial size brew tanks in a former cinderblock factory in Greeley. The area is already home to numerous microbreweries – familiar names like New Belgium Brewing and Odell Brewing in Fort Collins. So Carbaugh says it became very clear that he needed to be different.
“At the end of the day, beer is an agricultural commodity through and through,” said Carbaugh. “There’s a huge thing going on with the local food movement and farmer’s markets and ‘know your farmer,’ that kind of thing. And the question came up to us, why isn’t anybody doing this?”
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The Colorado Malting Company almost happened by accident. Owner Jason Cody started experimenting with malt and then gave it away to local breweries. When word got out about his new business, he decided to expand.
Hops are an integral part of the beer brewing process and nowhere is the ingredient more revered than at High Hops Brewery in Windsor, Colo. A two-acre hops farm supplies the brewery with fresh ingredients all year