A Behind the Scenes Look at Small Batch No.1: Haná Malt

We’ve decided to pull back the curtain and show you how our first release, Haná Malt, was developed. From the initial revival, the malting, and how we assessed the malt flavor profiles, here’s the story of how we brought Haná back!

A small handful of Haná barley seeds were selected in 2014 and grown over successive generations on prime Norfolk land in the East of England. This marked the beginning of the revival of the 1842 Czech Moravia variety, the pin-up for Pilsner lagers, and one of the world’s most important and influential two-row brewing barley varieties.

During the testing period, the barley was micromalted and then analyzed to ensure the malt was of the highest quality and would perform as intended on a larger scale. We also wanted to know if the malt would be suitable for brewing.

Finally, in 2018, we harvested an excellent batch of Haná barley to produce 14 tonnes of the malt you have used and loved today.

We made the decision to complement the heritage grain by malting Haná with our 1870s Floor Malthouse. The barley was slowly and carefully steeped, germinated and gently kilned to achieve a distinct low-colour and enhance the variety’s unique flavour.

Flavor is a critical criterion that we need to get absolutely right. Using the Crisp “Malt Tea” method, Haná malt was organoleptically assessed by our New Product Development panel. Each flavor attribute is identified and marked against a scale of intensity.

The result: a smooth, sweet wort with strong aromas of freshly baked bread. Delicious!

But, does this make a good beer?! We had to find out, so we put our Haná through the ultimate test on our brand-new brewing kit. The answer, to our delight, was yes! With the expertise of our Master Brewer Carl, we brewed two identical lager beers; however, we changed the base malt between Europils and Haná, see our Haná recipe here. This was to highlight the key differences, including flavor (blind tasting), of these malts and check that the malt processes through the brewery well.

We found that Haná’s performance in the brewery and organoleptic assessments passed with flying colors, so by this point we were very confident the malt would be popular.

Would highly recommend it, if you’ve got any left we’d snap your hand off.

Redwillow Brewery

Haná took roughly three weeks from launch to sell out. We were confident, but not that confident! Obviously, the whole team at Crisp were very proud of what was achieved, and it was such a pleasure to see the hard work, from so many different individuals and teams over the last few years, lead to such an amazing malt. As the phrase goes, it’s not a “goodbye”, but a see you later, Haná…

A big thank you goes out to everyone involved and all the breweries and distilleries supporting our Small Batch Series. If you haven’t already, make sure to register here for the latest news and releases. You might want to keep an eye out this month…

Ciao for now!

NPD Team