Spend time with Jason and Josh Cody and their father, Wayne, and you’ll quickly appreciate the agricultural ingenuity that has helped make Colorado Malting Company on County Road 12 one of America’s leading malt suppliers for craft beers and spirits.

There’s a lot to be said about the success of the 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 agricultural products in big cities, small towns and around the world. In this episode of The Valley Pod, you can hear Jason Cody tell the story.

It’s a company that can boast of being the first in the United States of America to produce and sell malt to spirits and beer producers, as Jason likes to say. Laws Whiskey House’s San Luis Valley Straight Rye Whiskey or many of the original New Belgium beers are proof of that.

The Codys can also claim to have been founding members of the Craft Maltsters Guild, which now includes hundreds of maltsters across the country and as many as 300 members. At one point in its early days, Colorado Malting Company had 187 craft breweries on a waiting list wanting to buy their malt, and Jason and Josh are treated like royalty on their many trips outside the San Luis Valley, including some abroad, to preach the gospel of craft malting and share how they developed a different system for malting that is fewer steps away from their farm outside of Alamosa.

However, to focus solely on the success and impending expansion of the Colorado Malting Company would not do justice to the genius of Wayne Cody and his sons. Each of them has contributed their expertise to the success of the family business, nor the hard work that has gone into it all.

This story has its roots in the Valley’s dairy industry and the Cody family, who ran one of these dairy farms until 1995, when they sold the cows and went out of business. The story begins in 2007, when Wayne Cody came to the family home and presented his mother with a contract to sell the farm. Her response was that she had $60,000 saved and could they keep growing crops and try for another year?

“That was the beginning of the malting,” said Jason Cody. “Then you have to imagine me ripping out all the stuff in that old cow barn, driving it into the driveway and saying, look, this is an opportunity.”

The opportunity was to figure out how to make malt to sell to the growing craft beer industry that was booming in major cities at the time, but Grandma Cody refused to sign the sale papers. So the Codys took the stainless steel tanks for the dairy and converted them to make finished barley malt.

“It just worked,” is how Wayne Cody describes the farm’s transition from dairy to malting. “You just keep going,” he said, standing in another building on the farm that the Codys had converted into their malt warehouse.

Wayne Cody suffered a traumatic brain injury in an ATV accident in 2012 and a few years later his son Josh moved with his family to Alamosa. At the time, Josh Cody was a professor at Concordia University in Wisconsin. Today he is the creative director of both the Colorado Malting Company brand and the Colorado Farm Brewery brand, which the Codys own and operate along with the malt factory.

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

Rye grain has made a name for itself as an ingredient in craft beers and spirits, and the need to grow more rye brought Jason Cody to the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable this summer.

The Rio Grande Basin Roundtable is a quasi-governmental body that works on water management issues and water-related projects. Heather Dutton, one of its board members, is one of the minds behind the Rye Resurgence Project, which touts San Luis Valley rye as one of the valley’s most sustainable crops for the simple reason that rye requires less water to grow and the grain develops its unique flavor when grown at the valley’s high elevation.

“There is a variety of rye in the San Luis Valley that has been around among farmers here since the Dutch settlers,” said Jason Cody. “There is no name for this variety of rye. When you buy the seed, they just call it ‘VNS rye,’ which means ‘variety not specified.'”

“We discovered through trial and experimentation that when we grew VNS rye on our local soils, which contain much more clay and much more calcium, the flavors we got in the distillate of this rye were different than the flavors you get from other varieties and other soils.”

To meet the demand for malted rye, the Colorado Malting Company must grow and harvest 1,700 tons; it currently uses 500 tons of rye. This expansion and the education of farmers in the region led the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable to approve the allocation of $111,500 to support the expansion of the Colorado Malting Company.

It was a one-time request from a private farmer to the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable to develop a private company, but most members of the organization felt it was important to encourage farmers to grow less water-intensive crops and support a company that would literally put San Luis Valley rye on the map.

“You can taste it most clearly in the San Luis Valley Rye Whiskey, because it is almost 100 percent our rye whiskey and has a very specific taste that we all know and now look for in this rye whiskey. That was not intentional, it was just something we discovered,” said Jason Cody.

As part of the company’s expansion, three new buildings are being built on the Cody farm: one will serve as a new malthouse with three automated drum malthouses, another as a new warehouse and a third as a grain cleaning facility.

The latest trend is smoked specialty malts, including smoked barley for single malt Scotch, and the new malthouse will help Colorado Malting Company meet that demand.

“Everything is going to change,” Jason Cody said as his father and brother stood nearby in the existing warehouse, which the Codys say will be converted into a workshop for “fixing and building things” once the new malthouse with automated equipment is built.

“When Jason and I were young boys, we played street hockey here,” Josh Cody said. “My grandfather, my father and my grandfather used it to store their equipment. In the winter, they would store the combines and tractors and everything else here,” Josh Cody said.

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

The day progresses and Colorado Farm Brewery reopens for Friday night in a few hours. The Codys head to the brewery to try Josh’s new rye beer and make further plans for the upcoming expansion of their Colorado Malting Company.

Related