“We want to lead the malt revolution”

On course for innovation | One of the world’s leading malt producers, the Boortmalt Group, has written innovation and sustainability into its corporate goals. BRAUWELT author Sylvia Kopp visited group innovation manager Irina Bolat and product innovation manager Cristal Peck at the Group’s headquarters in Antwerp and talked with two of the industry’s passionate key personalities.

The port in Antwerp sprawls out across several kilometres of the Scheldt delta estuary. With 300 lines to over 800 destinations, it connects people and goods worldwide. As an inland harbour, it also provides excellent rail, road, river and canal access to the heart of Belgium. In the midst of this vast hub and just 20 minutes away from the centre of Antwerp by car stands the biggest malt production plant in the world. When Boortmalt opened its fourth malting tower at this location in 2017, the capacity at the Antwerp site rose to 470,000 metric tons a year. In the same year, the Belgian company also erected an innovation centre here that among other things offers breweries innovation services and technical support. Research and development is primarily driven by two women: Cristal Peck, who was made product innovation manager in 2023, and her boss Irina Bolat, who has worked for Boortmalt since 2013 and as group innovation manager is responsible for innovation throughout the company.

Cristal Peck is an old friend from Berlin and the real reason why I’m interested in Boortmalt. Born in Australia, she was something of a star on Berlin’s craft beer scene. She first entered the limelight when she won a home brew competition in 2015. Her Framboise saison even had Greg Koch astonished, the founder of Stone Brewing who back then could occasionally be seen out and about in Germany’s capital. In 2017 Peck was hired by Berliner Berg for their sour beer brewery, where she made beer from mixed fermentation and barrel ageing. She also ran the Parasite Produktions beer label together with craft brewer Richard Hodges and ultimately took over as production manager at Berliner Berg. Until Boortmalt headhunted her in 2019 – an offer Peck simply couldn’t refuse, not least because at Boortmalt she can apply everything she’s learned and, first and foremost, everything she herself is passionate about. Beside beer, this is biology: Peck has a Master’s in biomedical science and has worked as both a biology teacher and in various labs, most recently at the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin, before launching out on the professional brewing scene.

“I love malt,” says Peck. “From the type of grain, environmental conditions, climate and terroir to the process of malting itself, it’s complex and diverse. It’s a shame that most breweries use malt as a basic ingredient – which should be as cheap as possible – where all that counts are the extract and enzymatic power. Half of Europe’s brewing malt is thus made from one single type of barley. “Regarding the choice of malt, the sensory profile interests very few breweries,” Peck regrets. She wants to change this.

At Boortmalt she has the perfect scope to do so. Its small malthouse provides batch sizes of up to a tonne, with two micro malting facilities able to produce lots of 100 grams to one kilogram. The range of raw ingredients knows no bounds. “We malt everything,” states Peck. She talks about exciting projects with hemp and lentils. Or how she developed a special version for a lambic brewery that yields more dextrin for mixed fermentation, among other features, and thus permits greater complexity in the beer. Her series of tests are of course also applied in the brewhouse. She tells me that everything is geared towards maximum flexibility in her brewery. “You can achieve any end product from each point in the process. We can set any variable we can think of.” The equipment includes two mills, one a new disc mill that also grinds grain with a higher moisture, such as green malt; two mash tuns for decoction and for brews with alternative grain types; a thin-bed mash filter and a decanter for various wort separation requirements and a wort copper whirlpool for wort boiling and trub separation.

New malts and infusion malts

The two micro malting facilities are used for product- and process-based innovation projects and for quality testing of harvests or new cultivars with minimal seed samples. After years of cultivation and development, this has given rise to the new Atlantis Malt Series together with biotech company Vivagran, for example. This features malts based on Tritordeum, a new cross between durum wheat and wild barley that has a high enzymatic power, high extract and low beta-glucans. The range includes the light Cádiz brewing malt, which Boortmalt claims has a unique flavour profile, and a selection of toasted crystal malts marketed under the name of Céres.

Peck’s first big break as product developer are her infusion malts. Two years ago, she successfully presented her portfolio at the CBC in Minneapolis. She hit upon the idea of flavouring malt with orange peel, lavender or thyme right at the beginning of her new career. In the brewing scene, it’s all about yeast culture and hop varieties. Things have grown very quiet with respect to malt. “And become a bit boring,” she adds. Peck thus began experimenting with spices and blossom that she added during the malting process. “To start with, I didn’t tell my colleagues about this because I thought it wouldn’t come to anything,” she says. Nine months went by before she was ready to present her results in house. Bull’s eye! Peck was subsequently given an internal commission to develop a genuine product for Boortmalt subsidiary Belgomalt. She worked with the Brussels Beer Project in order to obtain feedback from a brewery. Four variants have now emerged since 2020: sage & thyme, lavender & citrus, winter spices and gingerbread cookie with cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, pimento and clove.

As Peck emphasises, beers with infusion malts can’t be compared to beers to which the same spices are added during the brewing process. “The taste is more complex and more strongly integrated into the matrix. And aromas that go beyond what’s been added are revealed. One plus one is three when it comes to infusion malts,” she smiles. Depending on the malt product and brewing recipe, an addition of just 5 percent can be sufficient to have an impact on the flavour. In Belgium and America, the product is being met with a good reception – and surprisingly enough in Germany, too. Peck believes that infusion malts don’t contradict the German Purity Law, as they merely contain flavour and aroma components from other raw ingredients. “It’s just like smoked or sour malt: you still use malted barley,” she states. Her aromatic malts are thus even enticing bavarian brewers to produce beers with aromas of spice and blossom in a totally legal manner.

The pioneering spirit of the craft beer movement in Peck speaks when she claims that “we want to lead the malt revolution.” The Boortmalt innovation team predicts that many more exiting novelties will emerge in this field. The aim is also to build up knowledge of this raw ingredient and its endless possibilities. An educational programme is currently being planned to help breweries understand which factors influence taste and quality, how they can make clever use of malt to create certain effects and what needs to be observed in the transition from field to brew kettle to make the entire supply and production chain more sustainable. The fact that the former craft brewer is fulfilling this mission at none other than malting giant Boortmalt lies in the visionary alignment of the company that’s able to assert itself on a highly competitive market.

The fight for shares of this market is huge: in 2019 the Boortmalt Group took over the malting business of American food enterprise Cargill and in doing so became the world’s biggest malt producer. The Group has 27 malthouses on five continents. According to Boortmalt, the total capacity of the Group, itself a subsidiary of grain cooperative Axéréal, amounts to three million tonnes. Yet the malt market continues to move forward. With the intention of doubling its total output voiced back in 2021, agricultural company InVivo subsidiary Malteries Soufflet forced its way to the top in 2023. It took over SME Castle Malting (La Malterie Du Château) in Wallonia and bought up Australia’s United Malt Group (UMG). This gives Soufflet a total capacity of 3.6 million tonnes. Boortmalt is now number two, followed by Malteurop in third place with 2.3 million tonnes a year. Interestingly, it’s companies in Germany’s neighbouring country that control the top three slots in the malting business. For both Axéréal and InVivo plus Vivescia, Malteurop’s parent, are based in France. The Boortmalt Group treats this with Belgian composure and unwavering supremacy, positioning itself as “Masters of Malt” – which by its own definition means that “our focus isn’t on being the biggest player in the industry; it’s about being the best malting company in the world in the long term.”

In order to put this into practice, Boortmalt has written innovation and sustainability into its corporate goals as a “key strategic pillar” of the Group. “I’m really proud to head this department,” says Irina Bolat. “Without the vision and support of our CEO Yvan Schaepman, this task would be unmanageable.” Her team drives the development of classic product and process innovations as well as diversification in food and non-food, plus open ideation and cooperation with other companies.

“Hardly anybody knows what malt is”

Communication with companies outside the classic malt industry is a fairly challenging undertaking, however, as Bolat reports. If you only have a vague idea of which services can be provided, you can hardly cut any ice with large businesses because their contacts usually don’t have a mandate to engage in open exchange and develop innovations with external parties. What’s more, “hardly anybody knows what malt is,” claims Bolat. “We’re a hidden industry.” After Boortmalt’s initial overtures elicited little response, it’s now approaching the subject from a new angle. Bolat’s team proactively communicates what malt is and which potential it holds. They’re now concentrating on startups and have identified four relevant sectors: pet food, beauty and cosmetics, food and beverages and food tech.

With BoortmaltX, they’re offering new ventures in their early stages an entire package designed to jump-start their company, consisting of business coaching, financial assistance and R&D support (access to labs, know-how and a network). This has led to the establishment of an aquaculture collaboration, for instance, that’s both innovative and sustainable. By farming artemia zooplankton, startup Aquanzo is creating a substitute for ever scarcer marine ingredients that are a major resource in the production of animal fodder. Aquanzo feeds artemia with by-products such as process water from the steep, thus generating valuable proteins from organic material.

Bolat is enthusiastic about her job. “Boortmalt enables us to take risks and invest in new fields.” She’s well aware of the challenges, however; innovation as a corporate goal is an open-ended process. “It requires authority, mastery and a sense of purpose to be successful,” she emphasises. At Boortmalt, she and her team find all of this. And what’s so charming about the Boortmalt approach is that information on the new sustainable fields of innovation and the individual startups themselves is openly shared on BoortmaltX. The blog is really interesting if you want to find out about the business models of the new world. In sharing this information, Boortmalt is again helping to make business more sustainable.

Irina Bolat has two doctorates: one in industrial engineering and the other in food biology. Initially, she was group quality manager, but “it’s research and innovation that really fascinate me,” she says. She hired Cristal Peck because aside from her technical suitability for the job Bolat is also convinced by her creativity and determination – and because she considers diversity within the team to be important. “We need men and women with different backgrounds in order to exploit as many different perspectives as we can for our solutions.”

Bolat and Peck complement each other perfectly, they claim. And when Peck announces that “the time for malt is now!”, this reminds us that despite all the diversification, Boortmalt is still a malting plant and that innovative beers can also be based on new malt products – with immediate effect.