Craft malt on tap at the Rake
Visit a Bay Area craft brewery, and the staff will tell you whether a beer was made with Simcoe or Mosaic or Amarillo hops. They’ll tell you which local roaster provided the beans for their coffee stout. You’ll know, by the time you leave, the name of the farmer who grew the berries for their fruited sour, and which winery gave them the Chardonnay barrels in which their farmhouse ale aged.
And yet, until very recently, virtually all Bay Area beers were brewed with the same industrially produced malt.
That changed last year when Admiral Maltings opened in Alameda, a collaborative effort from ThirstyBear owner Ron Silberstein and Magnolia founder Dave MacLean. Admiral is the first craft malting facility in California, and since brewing its first batch last summer it’s sold 250 tons of eight types of malt and has found an eager customer base: Already, 112 California breweries (plus seven distilleries) have brewed with Admiral malt.
On its own, that would have been a significant development for our craft beer scene, and you probably would have started to notice mentions of Admiral Maltings in beer descriptions at Bay Area breweries. But Admiral did one better. In January it opened the Rake, a taproom where you can taste more than 20 beers made with Admiral malt, while looking at the malting floor itself.
The Rake is in good company here in Alameda’s old Naval Air Station. Just next door is Almanac Beer Co.’s new brewery and taproom; a short walk toward the water brings you to Faction Brewing, Rock Wall Wine Co. and the Hangar One and St. George distilleries. Slowly, this corner of Alameda island is becoming the Bay Area’s best day-drinking destination — especially since these establishments are less than a mile from the ferry dock.
On a sunny weekend afternoon, you would not regret a leisurely ferry ride, followed by a 15-minute walk past the repurposed warehouses on Pan Am Way to arrive at the Rake. The mood is relaxed, the beer selection is diverse and the educational value is high. When else in your life have you ever seen a malting floor?
In case you need a refresher (and you wouldn’t be alone): Malting is the process of germinating grain, usually barley, to create enzymes necessary for brewing. Not only does malting make the brewing process possible — by breaking down the grain into carbohydrates, like sugars, that yeast can ferment — but it also imparts a strong character on the resulting beer. Malt can give a beer its color, its aroma, its flavor, its texture, arguably more so than any other component of the brewing process, even hops.
From your table at the Rake, you can peer through a floorto-ceiling window to see the malting floor, which looks like a life-size version of a miniature Zen garden. You’ll learn, if you ask, that floor malting is the traditional — and superior — method of malting, but one that’s practiced by few companies in the United States. Before Admiral, California breweries had only a couple of options for malt purveyors, all large-scale and industrial, malting their grains in enormous steel tanks.
Floor malting, by contrast, is a gentler process, one that involves raking a shallow layer of grain, which has already been soaked, as it sprouts. Essentially, each grain has to be turned by hand, to aerate it during the germination process. Afterward, the germinated grain gets roasted in a kiln, then cleaned. At that point the brewing can begin.
Others in California have attempted craft malt before. Nile Zacherle, who makes the idiosyncratic Mad Fritz beers, established a malt house next to his St. Helena brewery in 2016. For Zacherle, also a winemaker, malt is the key to unlocking a beer’s terroir — for expressing, in the finished beer, a sense of the place where the grain was grown.
But while Zacherle’s malt house supports his own small brewery, Admiral hopes to support an entire industry. Like a restaurant that calls out its farm purveyors and identifies the variety of tomato that’s used in a salad, Admiral Maltings nods to both its grain growers and the grain varieties: Copeland barley comes from Cascade Farms in Tulelake (Siskiyou County), for example, or Metcalfe barley from Fritz Durst’s farm in Woodland (Yolo County).
The tap handles at the Rake read like a microcosm of California craft beer today, featuring everyone from the craft behemoth (Sierra Nevada) to the cult (Sante Adairius) to the startup (Seismic) to the activist (Pink Boots Society, here appearing in a collaboration with Ale Industries).
Of course, each beer’s malt type is noted, alongside its style and ABV. But don’t expect to come away with a crystal-clear sense of what each malt tastes like: The beauty of the exercise at the Rake is just how differently each brewery interprets its core ingredients. The Admiral Pilsner malt, for example, is used in both a hazy IPA from Half Moon Bay Brewing ($9/16 oz) and a delicate Czech pilsner from Harmonic ($7/16 oz). Gallagher’s Best, intended as a pale ale malt, produces an audaciously juicy IPA from Pizza Port, inflected with a distinct cannabis flavor ($7/16 oz), but also the nuttier, fruitier Nimitz IPA from Sante Adairius ($11/13 oz).
In Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing’s Maiden Smash pale ale ($9/16 oz), the Maiden Voyage malt contributes to a honeyed, floral brew; in Alameda Island Brewing Co.’s Sea Haggis ($8/13 oz), a Scotch ale, the same malt delivers a much richer set of flavors, led by mocha and toffee.
On the whole, the beer styles available at the Rake lean toward the classic, focusing mostly on ales. Absent are the bold flavor additions — the pluots, the bacon, the lavender; doubtless you’ve seen it all — that have become de rigueur.
One notable craft-beer mainstay largely missing from the Rake menu: sour beers, likely related to the fact that sours take a long time to produce. After all, Admiral Maltings is still less than a year old.
The Rake represents a spirit of collaboration — not just between a couple of brewer friends, but among California craft breweries more generally. That spirit of collaboration matters more now than it ever did, as the story of American beer increasingly becomes one of big versus small, with global beer companies merging and acquiring at rapid speed. Against this landscape, our craft breweries see each other less as competition than as partners in the larger project of promoting high-quality, independently produced beer.
Admiral Maltings’ malt is an important step in that project, making a craft alternative to an industrial product available to any brewers who want it. And now, at the Rake, it’s available to any drinkers who want it, too.
You could call the Rake a pleasant place to pass an afternoon, and leave it at that. But through a certain lens, you could also think of the Rake as an important symbol for where California craft beer is going.
Esther Mobley is The San Francisco Chronicle’s wine, beer and spirits writer. Email: emobley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Esther_mobley Instagram: @esthermob