Joe White Maltings launched its latest project at BrewCon 2018 in Sydney last week. The maltser, owned by Cargill Malt Asia Pacific, is working with Bintani on its Signature Malt, the first in a series of premium quality malt produced for Australian craft brewing.

The company says its plan is to select from each harvest, the best barley available and the best malt house from its network to process, to ensure the best malt specifically for craft breweries.

“It’s been sourced from a single farm and the bag will reflect where the barley was from and which malt house was used to malt it,” Bintani’s Dale Meddings explained.

“The aim is to have the best barley available in Australia for the whole season and with a really high level of consistency specific to our craft brewing market,” Dale explained.

An important element process is the assessment of each crop in Cargill’s analytical capabilities at its Sydney facility.

“We evaluate the quality in the state-of-the-art facility, which is one of the best malting plants in the world,” Sydney Plant Manager Mark Basic said.

“Every batch of malt is analysed for moisture content, extract, protein content, enzymes, viscosity and flavour content, so there are multiple parameters.”

The samples are then micro-malted to test their quality and see how it will perform for brewers.

Cargill’s Regional General Manager Asia Pacific Belgin Köse, recently appeared on Beer is a Conversation saying consistency is one of the biggest challenges facing the beer industry.

“Quality and consistency is essential,” she said.

“It’s all a matter of building that balance, but to build that balance you need the right architecture, you need the right foundation.”

“What I can certainly claim here is that the right malt provides the right architecture.”

Köse said that Cargill is very proud of the new Signature Malt Series.

“We wanted to bring a new product onto the market that would provide that consistency,” Köse said.

“But we also wanted to provide, every year, what Australia has best to offer in terms of malting barley by really targeting a specific region and having that single-region sourced barley malted in one location with a dedicated team of maltsters.”

“At the same time, making sure that product is available Australia-wide so that brewers can see the difference.”

Köse said that the consistency consumers will find from one bag to another, and the higher extract than what would normally be achieved in Australian conditions, are two of the main reasons Signature Malt will stand apart from other malts.

“It is just the high-end products that we will bring every year with a different story, because every year there will be a different region put under the spotlight.”

“This year our signature malt has been growing in the NSW region and malted in our malting house in Sydney.”

The malt is available now.