‘Just made it work’: Rye fields take root in heritage farm

Family behind Colorado Malting Company finds world-wide market for its craft malt

by c lopez, Alamosa Citizen - August 17, 2024

(credit: @alamosacitizen)

Spend any time around Jason and Josh Cody and their dad, Wayne, and you’ll quickly appreciate the farming ingenuity that has gone into turning the Colorado Malting Company on County Road 12 into one of America’s leading malt providers for craft beers and spirits.

There is a lot to say about the success of Colorado Malting Company and how the Codys were at the forefront of turning their 300 acres of barley, wheat, and rye fields into malt and how they found markets for their value-added ag products in big cities, small towns, and the world around. You can hear Jason Cody tell the story in this episode of The Valley Pod.

It’s a company that can brag about being the first in the United States of America, as Jason likes to say, to craft malt and sell to craft spirits and beer makers. The San Luis Valley Straight Rye Whiskey made by Laws Whiskey House or many of the original New Belgium Beers are testament to that.

The Codys can also say they were founding members of the Craft Maltsters Guild, which now includes hundreds of malt houses around the country and up to 300 members. At one point in its early days, Colorado Malting Company had 187 craft breweries on a waiting list to buy its malt, and Jason and Josh are treated as royalty on their many trips outside the San Luis Valley, including some abroad, to preach the gospel of craft malting and how they figured out a different system to malt with fewer steps from their farm outside of Alamosa.

But to focus solely on the success and upcoming expansion of Colorado Malting Company would be a disservice to the brilliance of Wayne Cody and his sons and how each has lent his own expertise to the success of the family business, and the hard labor that’s gone into all.

It’s a story that has its roots in the Valley’s dairy industry and the Cody family operating one of those dairy farms up until 1995, when they sold the cows and got out of the business. The story picks up in 2007 when Wayne Cody came into the family house and presented a contract to his mom to sell the farm. Her response: she had $60,000 in savings and could they continue to grow their grain crops and try another year?

“That was the beginning of the malting company,” Jason Cody said. “So then the image to consider is me out in that old dairy barn tearing all that stuff out and pulling it out into the driveway and saying, look, there’s an opportunity.”

(credit: Rye Resurgence Project)

The opportunity was figuring out how to make malt to sell into the growing craft brewing industry that was blowing up in big cities around the time Grandma Cody refused to sign the selling papers. So the Codys took the stainless steel dairy tanks and converted them to make finished barley malt.

“Just made it work,” is how Wayne Cody describes the farm conversion from dairy to malting. “You just go,” he said, standing in another building on the farm that the Codys converted into their malt storage warehouse.

Wayne Cody suffered a traumatic brain injury in a four-wheeler accident in 2012, and it was a few years after that son Josh relocated with his family to Alamosa. At the time Josh Cody was a professor at Concordia University in Wisconsin. He now serves as the creative director of both the Colorado Malting Company brand and the brand of the Colorado Farm Brewery, which the Codys own and operate alongside the malting company.

Josh is also the family brewmaster, responsible for the craft beers on tap at the Colorado Farm Brewery. His latest is a craft rye beer that is light and crisp and flavorful.

The rye grain has come into its own as an ingredient in craft beers and spirits, and the need to grow more rye is what led Jason Cody to the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable this summer. 

Rye during the malting process at Colorado Malting Company (credit: Rye Resurgence Project).

The Rio Grande Basin Roundtable is a quasi-government entity that works on water management issues and water-related projects. One of its board members, Heather Dutton, is one of the brains behind the Rye Resurgence Project, which promotes San Luis Valley-grown rye as one of the Valley’s best sustainable crops for the simple fact rye uses less water to grow and the uniqueness in flavor the grain takes when grown at the Valley’s high altitude.

“The San Luis Valley has a variety of rye that has been here among the farming community since we think probably the Dutch settlers,” said Jason Cody. “There’s no name for this variety of rye. It’s just if you go to buy the seed, they call it ‘VNS rye’, which is ‘Variety Not Stated.’

“What we found out, and it was all through trial and error and experimentation, was when we grew VNS rye in soil types we have out here, which are much more clay, much higher calcium soil, that the flavors that we were getting in the distillate off of those ryes were different than the flavors that you’d get with other varieties and other soil types.”

To meet demand for its rye malts, the Colorado Malting Company will need to grow and harvest 1,700 tons; it currently uses 500 tons of rye. It is that expansion and explanation to area farmers that prompted the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable to approve awarding $111,500 to help with expansion of Colorado Malting Company.

It was a unique ask of the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable from a private farmer to grow a private business, but one most members of the organization thought was important in its effort to get farmers to grow fewer water-intensive crops and to back an operation that literally is putting San Luis Valley rye on the map.

“You can taste it most prominently in San Luis Valley rye whiskey, which is because it’s a hundred percent almost our rye and there’s a specific flavor that we’ve all learned and look for in that rye whiskey now. It wasn’t on purpose, it was just something we discovered,” Jason Cody said.

Jason Cody, Colorado Malting Company & The Colorado Farm Brewery at a Rye Resurgence Field Tour on 9.20.2024 (credit: Rye Resurgence Project).

The company’s expansion will result in three new buildings on the Cody farm, one to serve as the new malthouse with three automated drum maltings, another as a new warehouse, and a third to serve as a place to clean the grains.

Speciality smoked malts, including smoked barley for single malt scotch, is the newest twist and the new malthouse will help the Colorado Malting Company meet that demand.

“Everything will change,” said Jason Cody, his dad and brother standing nearby in the existing warehouse which the Codys figure will be converted into a shop to “repair and build things” once the new malthouse with the automated equipment is built.

“When Jason and I were boys we played street hockey in here,” said Josh Cody. “My grandfather used it to hold equipment, my dad and grandfather. They parked the combines and tractors and everything in here in the winter,” said Josh Cody.

“It was filled with Coors barley once,” Wayne Cody said.

The day is getting on and the Colorado Farm Brewery will open for another Friday night in a few hours. The Codys head inside the brewery to sample Josh’s new rye beer and to plan more for the coming expansion of their Colorado Malting Company.