Eli Kushner ’24 is having a hopping good time this summer at the Blue Ox Malthouse in Lisbon Falls, a town next door to Lewiston. “I’ve really enjoyed working with the people here,” he says. “It’s a great team.”
Kushner has a Bates-funded Purposeful Work internship at Blue Ox to learn all about malting, a key step in the beer-brewing process. At the malthouse, grains harvested on Northern Maine farms are used to create flavorful malt for some of the area’s premier craft breweries, like Allagash and Maine Beer Co., among others.
In beer parlance, malt is a grain — typically barley or wheat — that has been steeped, germinated (but not too germinated), kiln-dried, and then delivered to breweries. Malt gives beer its color and, along with hops, sugar, and other subtle influences from the brewmaster, its flavor. For a brewer, malt has been likened to what an artist needs, “paint and canvas all in one.”
A double major in biochemistry and music from Philadelphia, Kushner puts his body and brain to work at Blue Ox, which uses a traditional and increasingly rare “floor malting” method. The grain is spread on the floor in a big room and raked. And raked. It’s then kiln-dried and bagged for delivery.
In the malthouse lab, Kushner helps with various quality-control processes, such as testing moisture content. “And we test friability which is basically how the grain crushes,” Kushner explains. Along the way, he’s been learning how to organize and present data visually, through charts, graphs, and the like. Kushner has been given guidance and training but trusted to do work correctly. “What I do is sort of up to me, which is cool.”
Before delivery, the Blue Ox team, including Kushner, steeps samples from the various malts. “Basically we make a tea out of the grains and test the color of that liquid,” he explains. “We have pilsner malts and pale malts which are on the lighter side, and Vyenna and Munich as it gets darker, and then caramel at the very end of things. Each product has a specific, quantifiable color range.” (Blue Ox spells it “Vyenna” as a nod to the Maine town of Vienna, where it’s pronounced “Veye-EN-na.”)
Original source can be found here
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