By Brent Manning, Board President
The Guild board of directors hopes everyone has weathered the first few months of 2022. We kicked off the year with the tough decision to move our annual Craft Malt Conference to a 100% virtual event. It seems hard to believe as we now see mask mandates lifted just a few months later. Regardless of the format, the event was extremely successful.
A tremendous amount of high-quality content was delivered across the two weekends on a broad variety of technical malting, brewing, and distilling topics. Remember that registrants can revisit these presentations until late May, so you can catch up on anything you missed. Find the recordings here.
A big congratulations to all of our 2022 Malt Cup medalists. It was a great evening for our industry. We had several varieties of barley, production techniques, and continents represented in the winner’s circle, a great testament to all the things that make craft malt special. A huge thank you to Hannah Turner of Montana State University’s Barley, Malt & Brewing Quality Lab, and Lindsay Barr of DraughtLab for organizing this event along with the over 100 hundred judges who volunteered their time.
The board would also like to extend a warm welcome to our two newest board members, Brian Estes from LINC Malt in Washington state and Jean Girardeau-Montaut from A VOS MALT located in Granges-les-Beaumont, France. Read more about Brian and Jean’s backgrounds here. A big thank you to Phil Neumann (Mainstem Malt) and James Weed (Solstice Malt), our outgoing board members, for their service to the Guild.
As we move into the spring, our focus shifts to medium and long-range planning efforts. Our working group leaders will report on goals achieved and set a course for the years ahead. This effort ensures that we remain focused on expanding educational opportunities and awareness within our community.
As always, please feel free to reach out to our board members with ideas, feedback, or questions.