ReferenceA map, a dataset, or a directory. It makes no recommendation.
Maltsters
Malting is where gluten-free brewing is decided. The grain exists in enormous quantity; the breweries exist; what does not exist, at any scale that resembles barley's, is the malting layer between them. This page maps the people and companies who do it anyway: dedicated gluten-free malthouses, contract maltsters who will run a clean batch, and the home maltsters proving methods the commercial layer hasn't industrialized.
Page established 2026-08-25 · seeded from existing site entries; growing.
How to read it — entry rules, and what a listing means
One owner, but the reader never has to leave. The full description of a person or organization lives in exactly one place: the role page owns the person, the subject page owns the work. But a short identity travels with the name wherever it appears: who they are, where they work, and why they are named here, in a sentence or two. You should never have to click somewhere else to find out who someone is.
Organizations sit inside the role they perform. A malthouse belongs here alongside the maltsters who run it.
Described, never endorsed. A listing is a map reference, not a recommendation, and implies no relationship with this site. Gluten-free status is reported as the malthouse states it, never as our assurance: verification is its own discipline.
What qualifies. A public-facing malting operation, commercial offering, or documented body of work. Private individuals are not listed without consent.
Corrections and removals: contact us.
The roster — who malts it
— Dedicated gluten-free malthouses —
Grouse Malt House — Wellington, Colorado. Millet, buckwheat and rice malts; states it produces gluten-free specialty malts exclusively. Verification worked example · subjects: millet, buckwheat
Jennifer Soles — Wellington, Colorado. Founder of Grouse Malt House, the dedicated gluten-free malthouse whose millet malts much of US gluten-free craft brewing runs on. The founding story, as reported · subject: millet
Eckert Malting & Brewing — Chico, California. Custom gluten-free malting and roasting with its own brewery attached; states a dedicated gluten-free facility. Verification worked example · subject: rice
— Craft and conventional malthouses that handle gluten-free grain —
Root Shoot Malting — Colorado. A craft malthouse selling to brewers and distillers off the same floor, the sector the dedicated gluten-free malthouses sit inside. The malthouse · subject: distilling
Crisp Malt / Micronized Food Products (MFP) — United Kingdom, and in the US market since around 2018. Produces flaked torrefied rice, pre-gelatinized for direct mash use, which moves the gelatinization step out of the brewhouse and into a supplier's process. The product · subject: process and equipment
Nexus Ingredient — MillMalt. A commercial sorghum extract line marketed to gluten-free breweries and positioned as a barley-malt replacement. An extract, not whole-grain malt: a different product class from everything above it here. MillMalt for brewing · subject: sorghum
— Industrial sorghum malting —
Nigerian Breweries Plc — Aba, Nigeria. Operates a malting plant processing 35,000 tons of raw sorghum, plus a maltose syrup plant taking a further 10,000 tons. Company · subject: traditional fermentation
The Nigerian sorghum malting sector — Nigeria. More than five companies made multi-billion-naira investments in sorghum malt plants after the 1988 import ban; roughly 200,000 metric tons of sorghum goes to the beer sector annually. ICRISAT review · subject: sorghum
The South African opaque-beer malting sector — South Africa. The industrial sorghum malting behind commercial opaque beer, and the reason a national sorghum malt standard exists at all. SABS 235 · subject: traditional fermentation
— Home maltsters —
Andrew Lavery — home maltster and author of a home-malting guide covering steeping, germination, kilning, cleaning and roasting across several gluten-free grains. Described on Homebrewers & Home Maltsters
— Household and traditional maltsters —
People performing this role at domestic and artisanal scale, outside any commercial malting industry. They are listed because the malting step is real, documented, and in several cases the only malting of that grain anyone has described in print.
Dolo brewers — Burkina Faso and the wider West African savannah. Malt and brew the best-documented of the West African sorghum beers; the standing review records the moulds and bacteria present through malting and brewing. The review · subject: traditional fermentation
Pito brewers — northern Ghana and Nigeria. Brew through malting, mashing, souring, straining, boiling and two successive ambient fermentations: the most experimentally tested of these beverages, with defined starters substituted for spontaneous fermentation in controlled trials. Djameh 2019 · subject: traditional fermentation
Oshikundu households — northern Namibia. Aawambo and Kavango households brewing from pearl millet flour, bran and malted sorghum flour, into a beverage with a shelf life under six hours. Processing methods · subject: traditional fermentation
Umqombothi brewers — South Africa. Xhosa brewers building the beer from maize meal, crushed corn malt and crushed sorghum malt, with the yeast traditionally raised from the root of the moerwortel plant. Processing and composition · subject: traditional fermentation
Chicherías — Peru and the Andes. Artisanal producers of chicha de jora, who soak maíz morocho for three to eight days and germinate it on a bed of plant leaves for one to two weeks before extracting the malt sugars. Microbial populations study · subject: traditional fermentation
Tiswin brewers — the US Southwest. Apache brewers, and Tohono O'odham, Piman and Maricopa people, malting maize in everything but name: kernels soaked until sprouts reach about half an inch, then ground, boiled, strained and fermented. Brewed chiefly by women. Sandia Lab News · subject: traditional fermentation
Gluten-free status above is reported as each malthouse states it, never as our assurance. Seeded 2026-08-25 from entries this site already holds; expanded 2026-08-27.
Bodies & gatherings — the guilds, standards and meetings this role runs through
Short by design. This role deals with a small number of real bodies: one guild, its meetings, and the methods and standards organizations its malt is measured against. A longer list would be padding.
Craft Maltsters Guild. The trade organization of the craft malting movement the dedicated gluten-free malthouses operate in. The Guild · subject: internal enzymes
The Craft Malt Conference. The Guild's annual meeting, the room where American craft maltsters compare notes, and where a gluten-free malt specification would first meet the people who would have to hit it. The Guild's events
Craft Malt Month. The Guild's September spotlight on regional malting: the annual moment the craft-malt world, gluten-free malthouses included, is most visible. The Guild
American Society of Brewing Chemists. The North American brewing methods body, the framework any US gluten-free malt specification would be written against, and the source of the methods a malt analysis cites. ASBC · how the method families compare
Cereals & Grains Association. The cereal-science society, formerly AACC International, whose approved methods sit beside ASBC's in malt analysis, the grain-side methods body to the brewing side's chemists. The association
MEBAK — Mitteleuropäische Brautechnische Analysenkommission. The Central European brewing analysis commission, and the other methods tradition a gluten-free malt gets measured against. The commission's methods · subject: rice
South African Bureau of Standards (SABS). Published SABS 235 in 1970, the diastatic-power standard for sorghum and millet malts, and with it the Sorghum Diastatic Unit — the one national specification we have found that regulates sorghum malt diastatic activity. A maltster selling into that market is judged against it. The standard, documented
Working with them — how a brewer commissions malt
If you want gluten-free malt today, start with the verification discipline rather than the product list. Malthouses that run gluten-free explains what a gluten-free claim from a malthouse does and does not cover, and where to get sorghum malt gives the honest state of supply for the grain this site is built on.
If you want it contract-malted, that is the route with the fewest structural obstacles. The questions to ask a maltster are on finding a contract craft maltster, and the grain acceptance specification you hand over with the load is on sourcing sorghum farmer-direct.
If you are supplying the grain, the maltster's first question is whether the lot will germinate. What makes good malting sorghum is the acceptance field guide, with one program's numbers worked through.
When the malt arrives, read the paperwork before the grain. Reading a malt certificate of analysis explains what every number means and why several standard barley measures come back below limit on sorghum malt, and the Lot Reporting Standard is what should have traveled with the grain in the first place.
If you would rather malt it yourself, the malting section carries the full stack (steeping, germination, kilning, lot release), and the amateur layer of this role is on homebrewers & home maltsters.
How this role connects — documented links to other roles and subjects
- Growers hand off to maltsters, and the handoff is an acceptance decision. A maltster is the first person in the chain who cares whether the lot will actually germinate, which makes growers the role this one depends on most directly. The gate itself is written down: what makes good malting sorghum.
- The document that should travel with the grain is the one that usually doesn't. The Lot Reporting Standard exists because a lot's brewing behavior is predicted by numbers the seller already has, and a maltster who receives grain without them is re-measuring what someone already knew.
- Brewers are this role's customers, and mostly its commissioners. Because dedicated gluten-free malt supply is thin, brewers frequently arrive as contract clients rather than catalog buyers: the relationship routed on finding a contract craft maltster.
- Breeders decide what a maltster can do before the maltster sees the grain. Diastatic power, kernel hardness and germination energy are varietal before they are procedural, which is why breeders sit upstream of this page rather than beside it.
- Labs and certifiers are how a malt claim becomes checkable. The certificate of analysis is the interface: labs & certifiers produce the numbers, and reading a malt certificate of analysis is how a brewer reads them.
- Home maltsters are running the experiments the commercial layer has not industrialized. The methods circulating in the amateur layer are documented on homebrewers & home maltsters and on homebrew and home malting; this page owns the commercial half of the same craft.
- Suppliers are where this role's output actually reaches a small brewer. A malthouse's sacks move through the distribution layer on suppliers before they reach most kettles.
- Researchers supply the measurement, and the measurement is contested. Barley methods mismeasure sorghum malt, which is why a separate assay tradition exists at all: researchers owns the people, and how the method families compare owns the argument.
- What a maltster makes is enzymes, and that is the subject link. Every lever this role controls (steep schedule, germination temperature, kilning curve) acts on diastatic power, tracked on internal enzymes.
- Where malting cannot deliver enough, the brewer buys the difference. External enzymes exist in this category largely because gluten-free malts arrive short of what a barley mash assumes: one decision, split across two roles.
- Traditional malting is the largest body of practice in this field, and it is not industrial. The household and artisanal entries in the roster above are described on traditional fermentation; the technique predates every malthouse on this page.
- There is no US specification for what this role produces. The one national standard we have located for sorghum malt is SABS 235, written in South Africa in 1970 for opaque beer. A US gluten-free maltster works without an equivalent, which is why acceptance and lot-release discipline on this site is written page by page rather than cited to a standard.
Who's missing — where this page's coverage runs out
- Named maltsters, as opposed to malthouses. This roster is mostly companies. The people running the floors and kilns (the maltster as an individual, with a name and a working history) are almost entirely absent, because the trade publishes company names and not staff. That is a gap in the published record, not a shortage of people.
- Malting-sorghum supply at commercial scale in the US. As where to get sorghum malt records, malted whole-grain sorghum is the product this site is built on and the one you cannot readily buy. We have found no US malthouse offering it as a standing catalog item.
- Contract maltsters willing to run a gluten-free batch. The route exists and is documented on finding a contract craft maltster, but we have not been able to publish a list of craft malthouses that will actually take the job, which is the single most useful thing this page could carry.
- Everywhere that is not the US, Nigeria or southern Africa. The commercial entries here cluster in three places. Gluten-free grain is malted in South America, South Asia and East Asia, and we have found little published about who does it or at what scale.
Malt gluten-free grain, or want to? Tell us.