As the only malthouse in Indiana, Sugar Creek Malt Company, located in Boone County, is rooted in a mission of producing high-quality malt with high-quality grains.
“We want to rekindle a sense of community where the brewer collaborates with the maltster and the farmer,” founder Caleb Michalke says.
The family-run business operates on a third-generation family farm and prides itself on its traditional-style malts – but also enjoys the freedom to experiment with unique grains and methods. They incorporate some of their own crops, such as wheat and malting grains, in their malt, but also source from farmers within a 200-mile radius of the malthouse.
“This diversifies our grain production areas and ensures a steady supply of high-quality grains, should Mother Nature hit us with extreme weather such as drought, hail, flooding or molds,” Michalke explains.
Because the grains used for malting are very fragile, Sugar Creek Malt Co. works carefully with grower farms to ensure they’re employing proper production methods. When it comes to actually producing the malt, the company uses a primarily hand-based process for every step from germinating to bagging so they can know precisely how the malt is progressing, hour by hour. It’s all done to ensure the best-tasting, highest-quality malt that becomes the foundation of good beer and spirits.
The company’s malts include base malts that go into commonly found beers such as pilsners and pale ales (including 100th Harvest, a honey wheat ale produced in 2019 in honor of Indiana Farm Bureau’s 100th anniversary). But the more experimental malts include Såinnhus, a Scandinavian malt that imparts a wood-smoked, juniper flavor into Nordic ales. To produce this malt, Sugar Creek Malt Co. converted remnants of an old bank barn on the property into a Scandinavian malthouse, where they now malt estate-grown grains and steep them in a trough before laying them over a wood fire to dry.
See more: Eat, Drink and Be Merry at Huber’s Orchard, Winery & Vineyards
Bringing New Tastes to Bloomington
Cardinal Spirits, a craft distillery in Bloomington, sources all its malt from Sugar Creek Malt Co., which goes into their aged bourbons and whiskeys. Co-founded by Adam Quirk and Jeff Wuslich, the distillery is locally loved for its popular restaurant and patio, which is especially in demand during summer months. It also offers trendy canned cocktails (including the Bramble Mule, Vodka Soda and, most recently, Bourbon Cream Soda) and unique spirits that capture the flavor of Indiana-grown ingredients.
Take Nocino, for example. A traditional Italian liqueur made with walnuts, Cardinal Spirits puts its own spin on it by making it from Indiana green walnuts harvested from the co-founder’s family trees in the northern part of the state. They use a traditional method for making Nocino: harvesting the walnuts by hand in midsummer while they’re still green, then steeping them in grape vodka with star anise, vanilla beans, allspice berries and fresh orange peel.
“Typically, we invite the community to come chop walnuts with us for the steep – it’s a fun way for our fans to have a hand in making this Indiana spirit,” explains Erica Sagon, director of communications. While Cardinal Spirits wasn’t able to produce Nocino last year because of a late spring frost that damaged the walnuts on the family trees, it’s looking forward to trying again this year, aiming for a fall release of the earthy, smooth, warming spirit.
Another crowd favorite at Cardinal Spirits is Creekbend Brandy, a collaboration with Oliver Winery & Vineyards, a Bloomington winery that happens to be one of the largest wineries in the country. The brandy is made by harvesting prized Catawba grapes grown at Oliver’s Creekbend Vineyard at prime ripeness, then distilling and aging them in toasted oak barrels. Cardinal Spirits releases a new vintage of this spirit annually that’s dynamite in cocktails such as a sidecar or a brandy old-fashioned, Sagon says.
Honey Schnapps is one more spirit produced by Cardinal Spirits that you won’t find elsewhere. It’s distilled and sweetened entirely with raw honey from family hives in northern Indiana and fermented with yeast gathered from honeybees that live in a rooftop hive. The unique concoction has a soft, clean taste with a lingering essence of honey.
No matter what you sip from Cardinal Spirits (whose products are now distributed in 12 states, as well as Washington, D.C.), it’s easy to see its philosophy of using real, local ingredients wherever possible – never bottled extracts or flavorings – pays off.
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