We recently connected with Todd and Emily Olander and have shared our conversation below.

Todd and Emily, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

Opening a craft malthouse was by far the biggest risk we’ve ever taken.
Malt, aside from water, is the biggest ingredient in making beer. It is made by taking a cereal grain, usually barley, soaking it until it germinates, then drying the germinated seed. This process produces chemical reactions in the grain that make sugars more accessible and turn it into a product suitable for brewing beer.

Todd, a 5th-generation Colorado farmer, has been growing small grains, including lots of barley, for his whole life. His family has been growing it for decades. However, for most of that time, all the grains grown were for commodity or large commercial markets. Growing for the commodity market is hard. Prices are set by forces outside of the farmers’ control, fluctuations in national and worldwide markets can drastically change the outlook of a farm’s balance sheet, and much of the crop grown may be shipped far from its source.

We have always been a community-minded business, and as we sat making business plans for the future, we began to wonder if there was a way that we could both continue the tradition of farming that our family has carried for so many generations, but also take more control over the crops we produce: how they are grown, priced, and used. And, in doing so, what if we could also support other small businesses? What if we could support our local community? What if we could do all of those things?

Colorado is a huge craft beer mecca. Rather than growing barley for large corporations or to ship off in the commodity market, we asked ourselves what would happen if we just grew barley for the breweries down the road? The problem was, we couldn’t just grow raw barley and hand it off to the breweries. If we wanted to grow barley for local breweries, then we would also have to malt it for them. And if we wanted to malt it, we would have to build a malting facility. That was a daunting prospect. We didn’t know anything about malting. We didn’t know how to build a malting facility. We didn’t know how to run a malting facility. We didn’t know so many things and yet, we decided to go for it. Todd dove into the facility planning and construction. Emily dove into business logistics like permitting, licensing, and staffing.

We completed construction of our facility in 2016 and – this is unbelievable looking back at it – just two months before opening, Todd traveled all the way to Canada to learn how to malt barley. Two months! Who builds an entire facility and only learns how to use it mere weeks before opening?

It was a huge leap of faith, and yet six years later we’re proud to say that we’re not just still in business, we’re growing! Our capacity has been steadily expanding since we opened. We’re producing more malt, bringing on new customers, and steadily growing our staffing.

Sometimes huge risks do pay off!

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

We are both a 5th-generation family farm and a craft malthouse. Our goal is to help the local craft brewing industry produce truly local beer. We grow barley in our farm fields, malt that barley in a facility right on the farm, and ship it to Colorado craft breweries and distilleries who turn it into the tasty beverages you imbibe on the weekends!
In the malting world, just like the brewing world, most malting companies are large corporations that work on a national or international scale. But just like craft brewing has carved out a niche among folks who appreciate both local and high-quality products, craft malting is doing the same behind the scenes.

While the majority of our customers are breweries and distilleries in the Front Range, we serve establishments from Grand Junction to Cortez, and from Breckenridge to Wellington. We’re a family-run business backed by a family-run farm and we want to support other small businesses. We’re proud that we produce a truly-local product, grain to glass, while also helping to create jobs and keep the economic impact of business in our community.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Like many businesses who made it through the COVID pandemic, learning how to continue operating during a time in which the entire context that shapes your business has changed, taught us to be resilient in ways we never imagined. For us, the hardest part of the COVID pandemic was the initial shut down of all non-essentials businesses. When our breweries and distilleries closed their taprooms, the quantity of beverages they were making plummeted, and our malt sales plummeted as well. They dropped by almost 60% overnight. That’s a massive loss to absorb, especially without time to plan for it. Obviously, we wanted our business to survive the sudden shock, but it was also important to us that we not lay off any workers, if possible. We’re a small, tight-knit business and we do our best to take care of our people. Plus, we still needed our employees. Even if our clients weren’t buying as much, we were still operating a farm. Crops still need to be planted, harvested, and stored. Barley was still being produced, and it needed to be malted and packaged. You can close down a beer taproom, but it’s hard to close a farm on short notice.
We did survive and we did make it through without laying off workers. We trimmed down and stuck to the absolute basics. We applied for every single loan and grant available to help pay operating costs. Emily was key in this. It took her working essentially full-time on finding avenues of funding to help us keep the lights on and employees paid, but we made it through the worst few months. As our clients pivoted and began selling more via to-go sales and distribution outlets, and as they slowly began opening up in limited capacity, we began selling more malt, but we stayed thin and stuck to the basics for a long time afterward to ensure that we could make it out in decent financial shape.

The last year and a half or so still haven’t been easy, but we’ve grown a confidence we didn’t have before. If we could make it through the toughest months of those pandemic days, we’re confident that we have the flexibility and the skills to handle any other curveballs, and curveballs always come when operating a business.

Any thoughts, advice, or strategies you can share for fostering brand loyalty?

We are a community-based business and we believe in creating community through what we do.
Not only do we want our customers to be able to produce a completely-Colorado product, we want them to know their farmer, know their maltster, visit the fields that produced the grain that made their beer, and see the harvest of the wheat that will turn into distilled spirits.

We make a point of knowing our customers by name, visiting every brewery or distillery we serve and understanding their businesses, their goals, and why they choose to use local malt. Seeing each location in person, being able to talk to the owners, the bartenders, and even the customers helps us understand who they are and how we can better serve them.

We also try to bring our customers to us. We have an open invitation for our breweries and distilleries to bring their entire staff up to the farm and malthouse, and we’ve had many businesses take us up on that invitation. We show them what barley looks like growing in the field, how it gets from the field to the malthouse, what the malting process looks like, and the equipment used to accomplish all this. It is so amazing to be able to provide beertenders this 360-degree view of the drinks they are serving at their bars and it allows the brewery owners to talk in a uniquely authentic way about what “local craft” means.

Each fall, at harvest time, we host our biggest annual event: Field Day. We choose one of our barley fields that is ready to harvest and put up a huge tent. We build a stage out of straw bales, and then host a party for all of our customers with food, drink, and music in the middle of the field. During the party, we’re also working: we run our combines and harvest the barley while our friends are there so they can see how it happens. We even let a handful of folks climb up in the combines and ride with us – a farmer’s view of how beer begins.

We believe that truly understanding where your food (or in this case, your drink) comes from is key to fostering a strong business relationship, but also a strong relationship with the land and with local agriculture. It brings our system full circle and our community closer.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.rootshootmalting.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rootshootmalting/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rootshootmalting
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/rootshootmalt

Image Credits
Emily Sierra Photography Brewtography Project Erin Timm