Edition 46: Friends of Warminster Maltings

by The Maltstar | May 3, 2023 | Malt-stars News

Brewing Resilience

We continue to read in the press, or on our phones, the fragile state of our hospitality industry. Pub closures making the headlines, and industry bodies relentlessly plead with government to intervene.

However, data released in mid-April by SIBA (Society of Independent Brewers) underlined the resilience of the U.K. Craft Brewing sector. In the first quarter of 2023 (Jan-Mar), there was a net loss of just four breweries, out of a total of 1,824 recorded U.K. brewing companies. To put this into proper context, we are talking about no more than 13 Craft Brewery closures, counterbalanced by 9 openings. In the face of a reported loss of 150 pubs in the same period, this says a lot about the appeal of Craft Beer compared to the bland brands of the multinationals!

At Warminster, we can endorse these findings. All of our ‘active’ accounts on our database are ordering malt from us, but perhaps not quite as much as we would expect, or quite as often. But all our customers are continuing to forge ahead.

However, against our current shortfall, we continue to open new accounts, and it is helping to make up the difference. We are talking about new accounts with established breweries who have formerly bought their malt elsewhere, as well as a number of ‘renewed’ accounts for breweries who have decided to come back to us. In all these cases, the motivation for originally by-passing us, or leaving us, was the price of the malt. We know this because they have told us so. But I think I can confidently claim in all these cases, the motivation for turning to us, or returning to us, now, is the quality of the malt!

Warminster Maltings - Traditional English Floor Malt

How satisfying this all is. I have been “banging on” about the importance of the quality of malt forever! Malt is not widgets! Malt is not a very standard product from a very standard production line. It is far, far more sophisticated than that!

Malt is the most important brewing ingredient, and the malting process is just as magical as any other part of the brewing cycle. The finest malting barleys in the world are grown on our own doorstep, and therein perhaps lies the problem. Both the barleys, and dare I say the malt, are sometimes taken far too much for granted. But surely, the last 14 months have probably warned us, if we are to protect our resilience, perhaps we all need to be a little more focused on safeguarding our most valuable raw material?

MaltingsFest 2023

The biggest beer festival in the south-west returned to Osborne Park, Newton Abbott, Devon for the 20th – 23rd April, with Warminster Maltings as the main sponsor. And our brewing customers were not only out in force, but they were also proving themselves to be a force to be reckoned with!

In the beer competition which preceded the festival proper, Warminster Maltings’ customers scooped all of 40 of the 89 gongs awarded (gold, silver and bronze medals), with the biggest individual haul going to Padstow Brewery in Cornwall, who collected no less than 7 medals; followed, in second place, by Utopian Brewery in Devon, collecting a total of 5. Although we like to think our malt has something to do with this, we would like to congratulate those two brewing teams in particular for completing the process we started so distinctively well.

Our very own Leam Moulder presenting Padstow Brewing Co

Teas in the Garden

Our garden has looked spectacular throughout the second half of April, with an amazing display of tulips in particular. Not only that, ceanothus shrubs are now bursting with buds, the roses are looking very promising, and our lawn has come through the winter in very fine fettle.

We agonised over it last year but were still nervous about proceeding with gatherings at the Maltings. But this year we said “enough is enough” we are going to try and go ahead and re-establish our ‘Teas in the Garden’ events for the months of June to September.

We will continue as we left off, the second Wednesday afternoon of each month, 2-4pm.

Homemade scones and cakes, all made by our very own Pat Whitty, served on bone china, to create that old fashioned feel when an afternoon tea was one of the three main meals a day.

If you live locally, or are visiting Warminster, do come along. As long as it’s not raining, we will do everything we can to make the experience well worth your while.

Robin Appel

Edition 45: Friends of warminster Maltings

by The Maltstar | Mar 5, 2023 | Malt-stars News

The Power of the Pen…

We have experienced a resounding response to my last Newsletter, both customers and potential customers visiting the maltings, which did much to cheer up the dark months of January/February.

Also, my suggestion that Warminster Malt is now a lot more affordable (when put up against our competitors), might be part of the reason why we have gained more than 20 new customers over the last 2 months. So, we are much delighted about all this. More than that, our malt sales over the same period echo those recent reports in The Morning Advertiser: they have been quite a bit better than expected. If the year can continue as it has begun, I shall have no fears about facing our new bank manager (new manager, same bank) whose visit is now overdue.

“I tried to write something very wordy that explains how walking around Warminster Maltings made me feel but I couldn’t really… It makes me sad because there are so few places like it left.

I’m infinitely grateful to people like Robin Appel and everyone who’s kept it alive for over 150 years so that we can enjoy, as brewers and drinkers, the fruits of their labour”

High Spirits

The recent news that Scotch Whisky exports achieved 37% growth in 2022, has to be good news for English Whisky as well. From what I can see, the market for whisky seems to have no limits, either to the price that older vintages can command, as well as the global demand for “the water of life”!

Within our list of 20 plus new customers, there are two English distilleries planning to make whisky, and, interestingly, they are only a few miles apart from each other. Not only that, they are just a few miles away from two more of our distilling customers, both of whom are well established in the English Whisky market. It would be possible to visit all four of them within a day, although, as I understand it, only two of them are geared up to do formal tours. Once upon a time I used to say there is probably a Craft Brewery within 10 miles of most people, in a minute there could be a distillery as well!

This increase in the visibility of beer and whisky production all around the U.K. should come as no surprise. The over industrialisation of food and drink is beginning to get its “come uppance”! But it is more than that.

Across England, we grow the finest malting barley in the world. Instead of exporting this raw barley, or even exporting the barley as malt, it makes even more sense to add as much value as possible here at home and produce the final beverages for export instead. Of course, there is nothing new about this: that famous and now international beer style, India Pale Ale (IPA), was originally created in 18th century London. Designed as a beer that could survive the challenging sea voyage to India, it eventually became the making of a number of English breweries, including Bass, over the next 100 years, all supplying the export market to the Indian subcontinent.

So, as they say, what goes around, eventually comes around! What is more, guess where one of the biggest export opportunities for whisky is? You are right, it’s India, …again!

MaltingsFest 2023

April 20th – 22nd 2023

Warminster Maltings is once more the lead sponsor of the biggest beer festival in the south west, due to be held at its regular venue, Osborne Park, Newton Abbott, Devon. This event, organised by SIBA, the Society of Independent Brewers, first began more than 20 years ago, when it was held inside Tuckers Maltings which sits alongside the park. Sadly, the maltings closed its doors 5 years ago, so the beer festival then had to resort to going under canvas. It used to be a great opportunity for us to meet our customers – on the first day, all the brewery principals, and their head brewers, were all in attendance. But that was not the case last year, when the event re-opened after 2 years of enforced absence. Looking back, perhaps this absenteeism should not have been a surprise: staff shortages, increased costs pitched against reduced sales, all prevented brewers from deserting their breweries, albeit their beers were all present and correct. So why do we continue as the lead sponsor?

MaltingsFest is a great opportunity for our customers to showcase their beers to a much wider audience than the regular week-to-week outlets. There is also a beer competition on Day 1, which awards Gold, Silver and Bronze certificates, and which every Brewer is very happy to receive, and then shouts about in order to promote sales. These are the reasons we sponsor this event, to ensure its continuity, which in turn, we hope, helps to sell more beer. However, we have suggested, now that the event is held entirely under canvas, that it might perhaps consider occasionally staging MaltingsFest at Warminster, where it could, once again, be in the vicinity of a working maltings. But the jury seems to be out on this. We will keep pressing.

CHAMPIONS!

Warminster Town Ladies FC did themselves, and us as their sponsors, incredibly proud last week when they became the CHAMPIONS OF WILTSHIRE!

An excellently played game against Royal Wootton Bassett finished 3-0 to our ladies. Congratulations to the team!

Wiltshire County FA Women’s Cup 2023 Winners

…the Force of Advertising.

Our latest advertising campaign has just gone ‘live’ (the Spring edition of the ‘SIBA Independent Brewer’ journal).

“Go West” – and yes, I will admit it has been partially influenced by the 1993 recording by The Pet Shop Boys – is designed to not only highlight our lonely status as the only Maltings in the west of the country, but, more importantly, that we are sat where the best barleys now come from. Thanks to climate change, the eastern counties, where all our competitors are based, is getting drier and drier, and it is impacting on the quality of the barley over there! A lot of the grains are getting leaner, which can compromise extract.

Of course, our competitors can reach out and buy more barley from the west, but for customers in the west, all this does is add more and more ‘food miles’ to their malt supply. So we hope those that put sustainability at the top of their agenda might begin to recognise this. I do not expect we at Warminster can help all of them, but we will do our best.

Please form an orderly queue.

Robin Appel

Edition 44: Friends of warminster Maltings

by The Maltstar | Jan 3, 2023 | Malt-stars News

2023 Together!

I would like to begin on behalf of all the team at Warminster Maltings, by sending you our Very Best Wishes for the New Year!

In particular to all our customers, because, based on all the most recent reports published and broadcast, we are facing a particularly difficult start to the next 12 months. But, at Warminster Maltings, we will not be fazed by this, and we most sincerely hope neither will you.

However, if there is anything we can do to help along the way, please do not hesitate to ask. Of course, we are not bankers, but if you would like to bring your team, or even customers, to visit our Maltings, we will be more than happy to oblige. Or if we can help with editorial, or website material/graphics, you only have to ask. Or any other ideas that you might have, just pick up the telephone.

Together, we can overcome the ‘headwinds’ we keep being reminded of, and perhaps more easily than it may at first seem.

Quite the Best Value Malt that Money Can Buy!

At the end of November we introduced our 2023 Price List to all of our customers. For the second year in a row this was all about a significant price increase, once again caused by the inflation in world grain markets, this time triggered by the war in Ukraine.

It amounted to a price increase for most of our customers of 10-12%. But it seems this increase is quite modest when compared to the increases broadcast by our very much bigger competitors, who have announced price rises that appear to range from 28-40%! These more substantial price increases are a direct result of huge rises in the cost of energy, something that so far has had only a minimal impact at Warminster Maltings. What this all adds up to is, we, whose prices are normally a bit more expensive than our competitors, now appear to compete directly ‘head to head’ with the giants of the industry!

So this is a message to all those brewers who would prefer, but think they cannot afford, ‘floor made’ malt. All of a sudden, now you can.

There is no question, ‘floor made’ malt is better than pneumatic production. ‘Floor made’ stretches back centuries, and the new technology which has succeeded it was never about an improvement in quality, it was really all about, and just about, the economics.

Back at the end of the 19th century when the malting industry first began experimenting with alternative methods to ‘floor malting’, both revolving drums and air conditioned boxes, the then leading maltsters concluded the alternative methods “could not produce the high quality malt demanded by brewers”. So they subsequently went back to building even larger and more spectacular ‘floor’ Maltings. Witness Robert Free’s grand Malthouse on the quayside at Mistley in Essex (one of seven in the town, now converted to flats), and Bass, the brewer, whose ‘floor Maltings’ at Sleaford, Lincolnshire, completed in 1906, was in a class of its own – eight blocks of Malt floors, each six stories high, with a 1000 ft frontage. Testimony to all this, the last floor Maltings to be built in Britain was as late as 1952, in Grantham, almost 100 years after Warminster Maltings.

The beginning of the end of large scale ‘floor made’ malt was the early 1960’s, led by Associated British Maltsters (ABM) who began building their cathedral-like pneumatic Maltings across the southern half of England. This, of course, all coincided with the industrialisation of food and drink and the arrival of the supermarket. Need I say more?

Leading U.K. ‘Floor Maltster’, 1961 advertising campaign.

Will anyone build a new floor Maltings today? I very much doubt it. Warminster is one of only three still operating in England, and there are six more in Scotland, all of those north of the border being part of long established distilleries, producing some of the finest ‘single malts’!

So there you have it. Warminster Malt is not only a very exclusive product, it is also a unique opportunity to experience probably “the best brewing malt that money can buy”!

The Changing Face of the High Street

Analysis revealed by the BBC at the beginning of December, has highlighted that over the two years of Covid lockdowns, there were marked changes to the face of the British High Street.

As we have all witnessed, banks and department stores have all but disappeared, but instead beauty salons and tattoo parlours, along with more places to eat and drink, have quietly crept in. What it amounts to is the High Street is transforming itself from a place to buy things into a place to, how shall I put it, to entertain or be entertained?

But what stands out in this report for me, based on data from the Ordnance Survey, post Covid there are now “700 more pubs and bars” on our High Streets than there were before, along with cafes, tea rooms and fast-food outlets. The evidence to support this in Warminster is the reopening of two pubs in the town centre, both of which had been shut for most of the last 3 years.

All we ever read about is the pubs that are closing; a lot of this publicity deliberately highlighted and targeted at the government by industry bodies lobbying for support. So it is refreshing to see another side of the story. Of course, this news may be of little consolation to the village pub which is struggling, but on the other hand, perhaps therein there lies a message.

But this report should be good news for our Brewer customers. Invariably, as one door closes another one opens!

Slow Progress

Work on our final restoration project is painfully slow, simply because the small team of carpenters and joiners we require at the present stage are only able to give us 2-3 days work each week. This team has come to our rescue when the original contractors walked out after just two days – they either decided they had ‘bitten off more than they could chew’, or they were lured away by more lucrative rewards elsewhere. So our present team kindly shoe-horned us into other existing commitments, and we are extremely grateful to them.

More than that, studying the workmanship going into our kiln structures, I believe that, once again, fate has served us particularly well. This woodwork is quite magnificent, and a true replica of what we believe was the original structure, so as authentic as we can make it.

There is no intention of firing up these kilns another day, we do not have the infrastructure to load, or unload them, or the personnel to operate them. Besides, anthracite fired Malt kilns pose a fire risk to the whole Maltings structure. It was back in 1924 when more than half the Maltings complex was destroyed by a fire that was almost certainly precipitated by one of these kilns malfunctioning. It was a common occurrence across the whole of the industry at the time. Our then proprietor, Dr Beaven, was unfazed by events, and immediately set about rebuilding. A similar setback today would probably have a very different outcome imposed upon us, sat, as we are now, right in the middle of a residential area!

Kiln No.3

Finally…

…a great picture taken just before Christmas by one of our customers, Corinium Ales at Cirencester. The sledge is their own, I am not aware our hauliers are carrying them, yet.

A Very Happy New Year to You All.

Robin Appel

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