Our New Malthouse

Sinagua Malt’s original malthouse began operation in Camp Verde in April 2018, turning locally grown barley into Arizona’s first commercially malted grain. This was based on a 4t per week malting equipment that used a germination/kiln vertical vessel and required a lot of manual work to move grains from steep to germination as well as to remove malt after kilning.

As demand from Arizona’s craft brewers, distillers, and homebrewers grew, so did the need for more capacity.

From the original malthouse to the new one

This was a mojor undertaking - the original SinaguaMalt malthouse was a two vessel malthouse with a processing capacity of 4 tons of malt each week - it involved a lot a manual labor, as moving the steeped barley to germination was done manually as well as removing the kilned malt.

This is how Sinagua Malt equipment used to look like:

While this worked perfectly as a proof of concept, for a real operational malthouse that could make a difference was a scale difference… The capacity needed was 8 time more.

In 2023 Sergio Goma and his wife Ofelia took over Sinagua Malt to take Chip’s idea to the next level - a real production facility to supply fresh malt from Arizona grown barley to Arizona craft brewing industry.

This was an undertaking to say the least - from renting 2,000sqf in an automotive repair shop and processing 4 tons of grain a week to a two industrial buildings 20,000sqf and 3 silos holding 1,200 tons of barley and be able to process more than 30 tons a week there is a leap of faith.

Here is how Sinagua Malt looks today:

This is the new Sinagua Malt Malthouse - it was fully operational and shipped our first malt November 2024:

We work with our farmers to plant and harvest barley and we store on the property 900 tons, the additional capacity for storage is on the farm.

What this means for our customers

It means our malt is as fresh as it can be - there is no closer farm to table than using our malt. It also means that our malt is the same always - we provide the seeds our farmers plan, every batch is analyzed and every batch is fully automated - we control the temperature, humidity and the full germination cycle such that the malt our customers are getting is always the same, alwas fresh and trully unique.

On top, since we have no investors, we are family owned and we live nearby, everything stays in our community and we are trully Arizona first.

Next time when you drink a beer and it has our logo on it, you’ll know you made a difference not only in the water that was saved due to crop conversion, but in the people that live in this community and for that, we thank you!