Determined to bring their love of specialty beers within the reach of everyone, the owners of Sprowt Labs spent three years developing a mini-malting machine.
The Acro Personalized Malthouse allows beer lovers to germinate small batches of grain without the expense of industrial operations. The first set of machines slid off the assembly line and shipped to customers in early August.
The equipment — about 65 pounds and the size of a dorm fridge — is designed to germinate wheat or barley seeds in tiny batches ranging from 10 to 35 pounds.
"That is very small, especially for the malting industry which normally operates on a very large scale," said software engineer and Sprowt Labs co-owner Brian Hedberg. "There are not many affordable options for making your own malts at a scale that is smaller than 5,000 pounds."
So home brewers, small craft breweries, beer researchers and farmers — called nano-brewers in the industry — are the company's primary targets.
The Acro malting/germination box must be used with a small fermentation hopper that Sprowt Labs also sells.
If it succeeds, the Acro would give homeowners and tiny craft brewhouses the chance to create their own malt blends just like malt-making behemoths such as Cargill Inc., Viking Malt, Bairds Malt Ltd. and Malteurop Groupe (which makes malts for Heineken).
"Long term we see ourselves as a platform for accelerating the craft-beer supply chain," Hedberg said. Custom malting on this small a scale is much bigger in Europe.