Local malts

To be honest, not really! I tend to buy whatever brand of the appropriate malt my usual supplier (The Malt Miller) has in, and I'm not consistently hammering out similar recipes to the point that I could single out the differences that are down to the specific maltsters.

 

Don't be so sure...I live in a small town, but our distillery was more than happy to share their spec sheet. The big problem is variety...I had to take an ~ 1.6L pilsner malt when I was looking for something a little more toasty. Met the guy who fabricated the malting table for the distillery the other day and he welcomed me to come take a look at his new, much bigger table and offerings...high on my list of things to do

 

dave, must be excellent having them all nearby.

 

Besides Anheuser-Busch (as noted in @mindbender 's post) MolsonCoors still operates a US malting facility (Coors had long had their own malthouse), and many of the world's largest brewers continue to make some of their own malt, according to this pdf bar chart from brewing industry consulting firm, First Key - looks like it accounts for nearly 1/4 of the global malt production but, yeah, not much brewery malting left in the US besides the Big Two*.

But that was not always the case -
THE POST-REPEAL US MALTSTER-BREWERS

* Grupo Modelo operated a malt house in Moorhead, MN, where one of AB's two malting facilities are located and, apparently, that was not part of the Constellation deal so it's now an ABInBev unit, based on the three different amounts listed for ABI-US on the graph..

 

Just occurred to me that Denny Conn's interview with Seth Klann of Mecca Grade malt is maybe relevant. You can find it starting at about 39:30 of Episode 50 of Experimental Brewing. (As they disclose on the episode, Mecca Grade is a sponsor of the podcast, but did not pay for the segment.)

 

I'm a little late on this one... but recently, I used a local pilsner malt (Rustic Farms) that took up almost 85% of my grain bill for a saison. It scored really well – 2nd out of 340 entries, so I'd say go for it! Do a little research first, since all local malts are obviously malted differently.. but for me, it worked out.

 

I have used Pilot malt a number of times with good results. Also, using them in a all Michigan IPA in the near future. I know of a number of solid breweries here in Michigan that use their malts too.

 

Timely post as our brew club is chewing on the idea of trying out a not so local maltster for a club project. They are located in Cleveland OH but look interesting:
https://www.hausmalts.com