The beer industry in the Carolinas continues to grow, and Tuesday saw another example of that progress at the North Carolina Beer Field Day held at Carolina Malt House in Rowan County. State Ag Commissioner Steve Troxler is pleased to see how the industry has grown adding value to locally-grown commodities.

“What this demonstrates is how we can take North Carolina agricultural products and add value to them. They’re able to take North Carolina grains which is a part of the year of making processes. So we have local growers of grain that are providing the grain here. They’re doing the malting process, and then that goes to the breweries that we have in North Carolina, now 430 strong, to make craft beer in North Carolina. So it’s a great success story, and it’s something that we’re trying to do with many of our agricultural industries in the state.”

Farmer Ray Horton is one of those farmers providing grains for local processing.

“We’re local here in Rowan County, it’s all locally grown, locally sourced, and it’s marketed as locally grown, locally sourced product. It’s a value added product that we start at the ground floor. When the malt house sells the product, it makes a full circle back to Rowan County and locally.”

The Carolina Malt House was founded in 2015 by Aaron Goss. His malts have won international taste medals, but tells SFN he wants to grow.

“We are a very small malt house. So we’re on the large side for a craft malting operation, but very much on the small side in terms of malting operations globally. So our malt house here produces only about .03% of all the malt used just in America’s beer. So there’s tremendous room to grow. I really believe in that Carolina quality. I think the people that have tried the beer here today will tell you that Carolina beer is the best beer, and we’d like to see that really take off.”

Lisa Parker with the North Carolina Craft Brewers Guild says Tuesday’s event brought it all full circle.

“We wanted to highlight the role that North Carolina-grown agricultural ingredients play in the North Carolina craft beer industry. We have breweries that are committed to using 100% North Carolina-grown-and-malted grains, and so we’ve brought out brewers who are sampling their beers. And this is just a really fun event that’s drawing those connections.”

Thanks for April Pennell Davis at NCDA&CS for her help with this story. Image Credit: April Pennell Davis