Malting is the process of taking grain and turning it into a combination of sugars and proteins. This is key to the production of great beer since malt is essentially what’s fed to yeast to produce beer.  Large breweries often do their own malting, taking barley and hops, and sometimes wheat, in and producing beer.  Other companies, and most homebrewers rely on someone else to handle this early stage of the brewing process.  We do exclusively extract brewing for reasons of time and space, so we rely on good quality malt for our end products.  Beer is mostly malt, so making that decision matters.

One of the celebrated names in malting is Muntons.  Their own slogan, as we mention in the title, is “World Class Malt.”  And that it is.  Muntons is based in the UK but their products are available worldwide.  If you speak to any experienced home brewer they will tell you that Muntons’ products are as good as any out there.  We’ve always had good experiences with both their liquid and dried extracts.  The dried extracts are much easier to find stateside for reasons of shipping cost. They also make home brewing ingredient kits, but since we’re partial to our own recipes we have never tried them. Given the quality of their other products, these are likely to be good.  We always lean toward fresh hops, however.

There are plenty of other companies that produce good quality malt.  However, if you’re buying top shelf ingredients, Muntons is probably on your list.