Washington Business Fall 2019 | Washington Business | Page 23

what’s working
To understand how the company innovated, it’s helpful to understand the process of malting. “It’s just
two ingredients — malt and water,” says Andrew Gibb, plant manager. And though the process has been
industrialized, standardized and scientifically analyzed over the past 4,000 years, “We still make most of
the decisions based on how it tastes and smells and looks,” Gibb says.
When the grain is brought in by rail, it’s cleaned and soaked in water, or steeped. It takes on the smell of a
dry field after the first rain. Then it’s moved to temperature-controlled, humid bins to germinate for four to
five days. During this time, Gibb and his team test it by hand at least twice a day. They note the vegetal smell,
sometimes sample a taste, and rub individual grains through their fingers to test for uniform chalkiness of
the starch.
Then, the barley is dried and slightly heated in a kiln to stop germination. In contrast to the cool, moist
germination area, the kilning room feels like a desert, Gibb says.
At this point, the malt is ready to be used in your favorite beer, though some malts get a fourth step: They’re
taken to the roastery to convert some of the starches into
crystalline and toasted sugar. Great Western Malting
produces custom roasted malts for Bale Breaker, Rogue,
Pyramid and Lucky Lab, among many others: Each batch
is heated in a drum and continually sampled, crushed,
and color matched to reference batches. The end result
— Mike O’Toole, president, Great Western Malting
are dark brown malt varieties with flavor profiles that
range from butterscotch to molasses.
“We’ve been on a journey as a company in
terms of what we can do with investment in
process — to challenge how we do things.”
workplace culture
Great Western’s culture reflects the depth of
tradition. They have more than 100 employees, and
many are related: On a recent visit, an employee
assessing malt in a lab recalled running around
the plant as a kid when his dad worked there. One
of the malting supervisors was introduced to the
company when his family emigrated and his father
worked in maintenance. In addition to strong family
ties, Great Western Malting brings in employees
from all over the world who all work for the same
parent company. Gibb, for example, is Scottish and
previously worked at a Scotch distillery.
The company culture was an important element
of its innovation. It leveraged both employees’
depth and breadth of experience and the expertise
from Clark Public Utilities to save water and energy.
Many of the ideas came from employees, including
then-plant manager David Cooke, who now works as the Global Continuous Improvement manager for Great
Western Malt’s parent company. They also brought in Clark Public Utilities for an energy scavenger hunt,
where malting employees paired up with utility employees to search for inefficiencies.
sustainable manufacturing
The changes are subtle but add up to huge reductions in energy and water use. Before, the grain was cleaned
and steeped in the same tank: The tanks were flooded with water to wash chaff away. Now, the grain is
brought in through a mechanical cleaner that uses magnets, fans, spinning drums and bursts of air to more
efficiently clean the barley. Before, air was humidified as it passed through man-made cascades of water
at intake: Groundwater was pumped to the surface, used passively once, then sent to the river. Now, high-
efficiency nozzles spray microscopic droplets of water to humidify the air in a closed circuit to reduce water
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