To start my examination of globalization and the homebrewer, I’d like to get a rough picture of today’s malt supply chain, with a focus on the movement of malt from place to place.
As homebrewers, we have a fairly dim view of the wider world of malted barley. The average homebrewer, brewing five gallon batches once or twice a month, might use 200 pounds of malt a year (18 batches x 12 pounds per batch, base and several dozen specialty malts). A very small commercial brewer with a 5-barrel system, will use 1.5 times that much grain in a single batch. A large craft brewery like Lagunitas (still not huge on the world scale) might use 20,000 pounds of malt for an average batch (270 bbl x 31 gal/bbl x roughly 12 # per 5-gallon batch) – that’s 9 metric tons of malt per batch (back-of-the-napkin disclaimer). The difference in scale between homebrewing and commercial brewing is tough to get your head around.
The world produced roughly 22 million metric tons of malted barley for brewing in 2013. Of that, 29% was produced by the three largest malting companies, 40% was produced by the five largest companies, and 55% was produced by the ten largest malting companies.
