Jim Eckert is a pioneer—the first maltster in the world to focus on rice. His malts are often found in the inventories and recipes of gluten-free breweries across the country.
While a few other craft maltsters are beginning to offer rice malts among their products—and as new research points to wider brewing potential—Eckert’s been doing it for more than a decade in Chico, California.
Here, he discusses how he got into malting rice, the challenges of trialing new products, and the limitations of sourcing grain that’s otherwise grown only as a food commodity.
The Origin Story
Jim Eckert homebrewed with friends in college in the mid-1980s. While he was involved in grain research at the University of California, Davis, he also began to experiment with malting at home.
“I tried to malt, and I was able to do it, but then I realized that the amount of time and effort involved was not worth it compared to what you could buy barley malt for at the local store. So, I gave that up, but it stayed in my memory.”
Like many homebrewers, he thought often about starting his own brewery. Later, while he was researching weed control for California’s rice crop, his wife learned that she was gluten-intolerant. “And she eventually started trying some [gluten-free] beers, and they just weren't doing it for her,” Eckert says. “She came to me one and said, ‘Well, you're a homebrewer, why don’t you brew me a gluten-free beer that I like?’”
So he started to look into it. “I made one batch with just some rice extract, and it was fizzy alcohol-water that had minimal character,” he says. “And she was thrilled. But I just couldn't look at myself in the mirror.”
His research continued, and he began to think more about the grains he was working with every day. “I finally went, ‘Well, I’m here at the Rice Experiment Station. I have lots of rice available to me, and I’ve got some knowledge about malting. And I’ll just malt some rice and try to make a little bit more interesting beer.’ And so I did. I malted and dried it and roasted it in the oven at home. It was not wonderful, but it was progress. I went, ‘You know, this has some potential.’
“So, I continued playing around with small-batch malting. And there was a day that I made a batch, and it was de-hulled and roasted to an amber-crystal kind of color. It was a really small batch—like three handfuls. It was in a bowl cooling off, and my daughter walks through the door and her hand goes in the bowl and into her mouth before I could say [anything]. And she just, ‘Crunch, crunch, crunch.’ She said, ‘That’s good, Dad! Make more.’ So, I tasted it—because I hadn’t even tasted it yet—and it’s like, ‘Yeah, okay, there’s something there.’
“I continued to play around with it, malting and roasting in my kitchen, filling the house with smoke, trying to make a really dark malt.”
Challenges
Meanwhile, he was looking for information online about malting rice. “There’s almost nothing. Some Italian researchers had done some work with malting, and some Nigerians had done something. But I was looking at all their research papers and realizing that I was ahead of them in what I knew about it. So, I decided, ‘Well, this is worth giving it a go.’ So, I started to pursue it more diligently.”
As he grew more serious about launching the business, he left his day job and committed. “First thing I did was buy an old pistachio-roasting machine that was in really ugly shape and had it rebuilt. And that’s been my pride and joy—my little roaster. … It does about 400 pounds at a time. … It’s been a good machine. It’s done everything I ever expected out of it [and] a little bit more.”
The plan was to make the malt for his own gluten-free beers, made with 100 percent malted rice. They included a pale lager, dark lager, pale ale, and a Belgian-style strong ale. “I hit the market apparently a little bit too early and didn’t get traction on that,” he says about the beers. “But I got traction on the malting.” That business has been going for about 12 years now—growing exponentially at times but plateauing more recently.
“We’re kind of in a steady state right now,” he says, with gluten-free craft brewers facing the same market challenges as others. “There have been a number of breweries that have gone out of business in the last year or two.”
Occasionally, he says, non-gluten-free brewers buy his malt to produce summer lagers or other lighter-bodied beers. “And I believe they’re using my malt in order to say that they had an all-malt beer, instead of one that’s using adjunct rice. That being said, the flavor profiles of my malts are slightly different than barley malts. I try to hit similar colors and flavors, [but] it’s not exactly the same. It’s just different; there’s no way around that. It is not barley.
“Definitely the biggest thing that people talk about is that [it] doesn’t have as much body as barley beer,” he says. “And one of the other big things is that rice has never been bred for malting quality, brewing quality, so enzyme activity is limited. And almost all gluten-free malt producers highly suggest use of extraneous enzymes to get full conversion. That goes for my product, at this point in time, until somebody breeds rice that has higher enzyme activity for breaking down the starches more efficiently.”
Limitations
Eckert says he uses only two or three of the most available rice varieties in California, so that he can make sure he has enough for malting. “I've not seen anything extraordinary,” he says. “If there’s something as extraordinary—extraordinarily better—I might consider using it and trying to get some sort of a legal contract. But currently I have a very understanding supplier that always lets me know when they’re going to be selling off their crop.”
He says he’s “played around” with some other varieties, such as California-grown basmati and red rice. But for those specialty varieties, it would take a bigger commitment to establish the commitments between grower and maltster, and maltster and brewer. “But no one’s moved forward sufficiently to make it worthwhile to do it on the production scale we have,” he says. “For a small malting company to bring in sufficient rice to make it worth it—for the producer of the rice to sell it to me—I don’t have clientele purchasing it to make it worthwhile to go that route. … If we had an agreement ahead of time for close to a full batch, or at least a half-batch, I would consider it.”
In his company’s earlier days, he says, he worked hard to convince more mainstream breweries to try out rice malt. “I went to several Craft Brewers Conferences and handed out samples to lots of barley breweries, trying to convince them to use my grain,” he says. “And I got zero traction from all that work.”
He has worked with a few non-gluten-free breweries since then, plus a few distilleries. Now, with the University of Arkansas research helping to raise rice malt’s profile, he says he’d welcome some wider interest. “It’d be great to see more barley breweries utilize my malt.”