The key word in the title is “Continuous”, but you’ll appreciate for the most part, we’re not talking about the process of malting just the ancillary stuff. This time it is a brand-new Packing Line for our 25kgs malt sacks, which take up most of our weekly output.

One of the challenges of operating an old-fashioned process like ours is that the method and design of the buildings were originally designed around ‘man handling’. And when it comes to containers, I am talking about ‘man handling’ of much heavier weights than anything we are allowed to handle today. When I began in the business, a lot of years ago, the barley/malt sack content was 100kgs. Today, it is considerably less, it is only 25kgs. But regardless of this, the officers from ‘Health & Safety’ are never happy about anything that involves physical lifting of any sort.

Our new Packing Line is a serious step up from its predecessor, but quite deliberately not fully automated, because most of our malt deliveries are very bespoke orders, 40x25kgs sacks on a single pallet (1 tonne) but made up of four different malts which have to be individually hand selected and packed. But our new machine picks up empty sacks, feeds them individually to a single malt supply, weighs, stitches and labels the sacks, and drops them onto a short conveyor that feeds the pallet. For most pallets this is in the order of 36x25kgs of a base malt, the other 4x25kgs being different specialist malts, each individually added as the pallet is completed. I should point out that whilst this new kit free’s up one pair of hands to do other things, no-one has been made redundant.

We had planned to shut down the Pack House for just over a week in June, and hoped that with careful management, and the kind co-operation of many of our customers, business would carry on as usual. Largely it did, but installation of the new machine hasn’t been without issue, and we were perhaps a bit too ambitious in expecting that this high tech bit of kit would be fully operational in the timeframe we had set.

However, despite the ‘teething problems’, we have succeeded in maintaining our malt supply. Enormous thanks to our customers for their understanding and support, and to our wonderful maltsters who have gone above and beyond to ensure the malt still went out the door.

We would, of course, describe our malts as ‘The Crown of all Malts’, but Lisa Conduit, who helps me to compile and mail this Newsletter, created this “Crown of Malts” just in time for the Coronation in May, but too late for my last edition. Lisa did ‘publish’ her Crown on social media, but if you missed that, I reproduce it here.

I am quite certain Lisa has now started something that we might see more of another day. Nothing immediately springs to mind, as I write, but I am sure something or some event will precipitate further examples of malt as art. Watch this space.

Robin Appel