LISBON — As the craft brewing industry started to take off in Maine in the 1990s, so did the demand for malted barley — a key ingredient of beer and distilled spirits like whiskey.

Prior to 2014, there was no malting operation in Maine, forcing brewers and distillers to import malted barley, and limiting access to the craft brewing market for Maine’s small- to medium-sized grain producers, even though Maine is among the largest small grains producers in the Northeast.

Joel Alex has been key to changing the equation in the 11 years since he founded Blue Ox Malthouse in Lisbon Falls, which has grown to become the largest floor-malting operation in North America and the largest outside of Europe.

His decision to create a malthouse got the attention of Maine’s largest craft brewer early on.

“It was a very critical piece of our kind of journey using local ingredients for making our beer — and not just ours — like many other breweries in the state,” said Jason Perkins, Allagash Brewing’s brewmaster and vice president of brewing operations.

The malting process is important because it converts the starches in barley into fermentable sugars, which yeast then converts into alcohol. Floor malting is more traditional and labor-intensive than mechanized malting, but the process is gentler on the grain and produces a higher quality and more consistent product.

Alex, who had dabbled in some home brewing, ran into a craft brewer at a farmer’s birthday party in the early 2010s and the conversation turned to local ingredients. “There’s some people doing hops,” Alex said he was told, “(but) we can’t really use local grains as nobody’s malting it.”

At the time, Alex was applying to graduate school and involved with now-inactive Slow Money Maine — part of a national network that connects farmers with food-related businesses. The Colby College graduate was not a farmer or even a brewer, but had worked in conservation and rural community development, the realm of nonprofits.

“I had a lot of friends who were doing agriculture, like food production or food processing for a living,” Alex said. “And as somebody who really cares about sustainable development, I feel like food is such a great connection point for getting people to think about and start to care about sustainability.”

In 2014, Alex was awarded a technical assistance grant from the Maine Grain Alliance — made possible by Allagash Brewing and the Quimby Family Foundation. It was seed money to create what the organization calls “an important avenue for the expansion of processing of malt-grade grains for the brewing industry.”

Maine Grain Alliance is a nonprofit organization formed in 2007 to rebuild Maine’s grain infrastructure and share its knowledge with grain farmers, bakers, millers, researchers and others.

Tristan Noyes is the group’s executive director. He said awarding Alex the grant was very significant. “We talk about it still as a representation of the progress that has been made inside of our regional grain economy,” he said, adding that Alex helped to alleviate “one of the most fundamental bottlenecks that was holding back growth inside of the regional grain economy, which was the lateral processing.”

EARLY DAYS AND EARLY CHALLENGES

By March 2013, Alex had scuttled his plans for grad school, left his salaried job in Farmington and hit the road. For the next 18 months he lived out of his car and was couch surfing with friends and family. Belfast, Limestone, Linneus — he wanted to spend time in The County and see if his idea of malting would fly.

“I was meeting people that were already producing and processing grains like Amber Lambke, who was a few years into Maine Grains … Aurora Mills and Farm, I was definitely up talking to folks up in The County and learning everything I could about what was happening with grain and specifically barley,” Alex remembered.

The majority of grains grown in Maine come from Aroostook County. Potato farmers grow barley and other small grains as rotational crops for soil management and pest control. Until about 10 years ago, the barley was almost exclusively sold as feed or shipped out of state and sold into commodities markets.

The problem Alex faced was two-fold: a lack of infrastructure and not enough small- to medium-sized farmers capable of providing the high-quality, two-row barley he wanted. “When we started there was no off-the-shelf, turnkey malting system,” he said, likening the situation to early craft brewers in the 1990s using dairy tanks to make beer.

Having to start from scratch also influenced his decision to opt for floor malting over mechanical malting. “Floor malting appealed to me,” Alex said, “the tradition of it … those traditional methods are very gentle on the grain they produce … they require more interaction with the grain with more labor.”

With no “used” malting equipment to buy, Alex started from scratch, and malting equipment is not cheap. In 2018, the Craft Maltsters Guild estimated the capital cost of a startup malthouse a fraction of the size of Blue Ox at between $838,000 and $1 million. Conventional loans are usually out of the question, as banks consider most startups too risky and unproven.

Coastal Enterprises Inc. is a Maine-based nonprofit community development financial institution. They’ve been working with Alex since 2014 providing several loans as he got his business up and running, combined with support services and business advice.

“We’ve always had a particular interest in supporting the local food system and Joel’s business falls right into that,” said Leah Batt, the communications and marketing manager for CEI. “We saw this as an opportunity to not only support a new business that was happening but a business that would be a significant off-taker for grain producers in Maine and support Maine agriculture, which is a sector that we’ve always cared deeply about.”

In January 2014, Joel Alex processed his first pilot batch of malted grain in Belfast. By spring 2015, Blue Ox Malthouse found its home in an empty warehouse in Lisbon Falls, where it remains today.

GROWN, MALTED AND BREWED IN MAINE

Small batches grew into larger batches and in the early days, Blue Ox Malthouse was processing five tons, or 10,000 pounds at a time. That was too much demand for small grain farmers who were working 4 to 5 acres, yielding 3,000 pounds.

But it was too little demand for larger farms, who said Alex was too hard to work with because of his company’s size. So, they shipped their grain out of state by rail car to commodity markets or to be sold as livestock feed.

So Alex worked with smaller and mid-sized farmers to convince them to grow the grains he needed — grains that were usually a rotation crop for them and not their cash crop, like potatoes. “We know we need to pay farmers more in order to incentivize them to grow this, and to make it worth their while,” he said. “If we’re going to pay more for the grain, we have to have a product that we can charge more for in the market.”

Meanwhile, Allagash Brewing was growing and looking to replace imported grains with Maine-grown grains. “We met Joel very early on when he was just doing test batches,” said Perkins, Allagash’s brewmaster. “It was right around the time that we were really strongly exploring using more and more local ingredients.”

In 2016 Allagash pledged to use 1 million pounds of Maine-grown and Maine-processed grains within five years. At the time, they were using about 50,000 pounds of local grain. Blue Ox was small at the time and Maine Malt House — the only other malting operation in the state — was just starting. They had no infrastructure, no storage and most of all little grain to process.

Allagash struck a deal with both malting operations. “It was a verbal conversation but it was a verbal commitment that we will slowly, over five years, increase our purchasing of grain from you,” Perkins said. Allagash expects to brew with 1.7 million pounds of Maine grain this year.

Blue Ox reached its capacity in 2020 of 1 million pounds and expanded from 7,500 square feet to 20,000, dedicating its expanded facility in October 2024 with a new capacity of 5 million pounds a year. Alex said he’s at about half that capacity as he ramps up.

Blue Ox Malthouse has earned a reputation for producing high-quality malt, winning Best of Show and two gold medals at the 2025 Malt Cup Awards, hosted by the Craft Maltsters Guild. In three years, Blue Ox has racked up six medals, competing against 34 malthouses from seven countries this year.

“Joel Alex and the team at Blue Ox Malthouse exemplify what it means to grow with purpose,” Commissioner Amanda Beal said in a Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry statement.

“By tripling their malting floor and quadrupling processing capacity, Blue Ox strengthens the Northeastern grain supply chain while creating new opportunities for Maine farmers. This project, supported in part by Governor Mills’ Agricultural Infrastructure Investment Program, advances our shared commitment to sustainable, resilient farming and local food systems.”

Noyes, from the Maine Grain Alliance, calls Alex incredibly pioneering. “Millions and millions of pounds of local barley have now remained inside of our regional grain system and value chain because of the efforts that he’s put forward.”

Perkins said Alex is a good conduit from the farmer to the brewer. Even if you don’t drink beer, it’s a win on many levels, from jobs, tax revenue and long-term sustainability.

“So, even if you’re not a beer drinker, I think, supporting (the) local economy and supporting the local grain economy … it’s hard to argue with that,” he said.