Excerpt:

The latest beers from breweries like Faction, Cellarmaker, and Black Sands have a certain something thing in common, and it’s not the same experimental hop variety or a new strain of yeast. For the first time, they’ve all been brewing with local, Bay Area malt — the dried, germinated barley which forms the basis for beer.

Admiral Maltings is now up and running in a former dry goods facility at the Alameda Naval Air base, making craft malt a new possibility for Bay Area brewers. “For the most part, malt still follows the old model, back when there was just Budweiser, Miller, and Coors,” explains Ron Silberstein, the longtime head brewer at ThirstyBear who formed Admiral Maltings with Magnolia Brewpub founder Dave McLean and investment from Sierra Nevada founder Ken Grossman.

Yes, that’s right. The vast majority of craft brewers still get their malt from the same major suppliers that provide for big breweries. And if it seems like an oversight that one of beer’s four key ingredients — hops, yeast, water, and malt — is mostly homogenous and mass-produced far from the small breweries that use it, that’s because it is. But a new fleet of craft maltsters including Admiral — the North American Craft Maltsters Guild counts about 300 members — has plans to change that, challenging large malt houses to do for malt what’s already been done for beer generally.