Snape Maltings

Sailing barge on the River Ore

Alongside food one of my lifelong passions is history.  It has been a great pleasure ever since I settled in my adopted county to discover Suffolk’s rich heritage in food production.  Suffolk’s agricultural tradition owes a lot to the county’s location close to London, and its great communication links, especially by water.   Produce from Suffolk farms could be moved readily to the coast by the famous sailing barges on the county’s rivers: the Stour, the Orwell, the Deben, the Waveney and my own local river the Alde/Ore, and from there down the coast to the great metropolis.

For over a hundred years the Alde, which becomes the Ore when is passes Aldeburgh and turns south to Orford, was important in the transportation of one commodity in particular, malt.

Barley used in malting

Malt is produced by first starting and then stopping the germination of barley.  This process causes the barley to convert starch in to sugar producing the characteristic sweet tasting product which features in so much of our food, and even more importantly our drinks.  Malted barley is used in bread making and biscuits; it’s found in breakfast cereals and confectionery (think Maltesers and Mars Bars); it’s used for bedtime drinks such as Horlicks, Ovaltine or Milo, and goes into manufactured sauces and malt vinegar; it has been used in brewing since at least 2500BC, and forms the basis of the Scotch whisky industry, which still consumes 40% of Britain’s malt production today.

From the middle ages, most villages would have had a small malting house to supply local brewers and bakers, but in the nineteenth century improved brewing techniques allowed brewers to expand production and they demanded greater quantities of malt.  Large-scale maltings grew up to match the challenge and local malt houses all over the country closed down.  In Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), Thomas Hardy says of Weatherbury, “the ancient malt-house, which was formerly so characteristic of the parish, has been pulled down these twenty years”.

Grainstore at Snape Maltings

One of the winners in this industrialization of malting was the maltster and brewer, Newson Garret of Leiston.  Having bought a local grain and coal business at Snape Bridge he began malting barley in 1854.  Snape Maltings grew over the years to become a sizeable operation.  Garret’s malt was exported by boat to London and further afield to the continent.

Turning the malt

Malting the traditional way was labour intensive.  After three days of seeping the barley in successive changes of water, the grain starts to sprout.  It is then spread out on a malting floor where it it’s raked and turned by hand two or three times a day for about  five days.  At that point the barley is then transferred to a kiln where it’s dried to stop the process and allow the malt to take on colour.

Snape Maltings

From the 1940s onwards large pneumatic machines were gradually adopted for drying malt. These machines employed far less labour, halved the processing time to around five days and allowed much greater scale of production. The industry entered yet another phase of consolidation and Snape’s days were numbered.

Today Britain is still the third biggest producer of malt in the world after China and the USA, making about 10% of global output.  British malt is exported to over 80 countries and is used by 14 of the top 20 brewers in the world.  Suffolk is still a big grower of barley.

Suffolk grows a lot of barley

However Snape closed its doors in 1960 and is now used for a variety of purposes including a famous concert hall and venue of the Aldeburgh Festival.

Sailing barges no longer plough majestically up and down the river to Snape at high tide.  But if you half close your eyes you can still see wagons drawn up under the grain hoists, and if you breathe deeply enough you might just be able to sense an “atmosphere laden with the sweet smell of new malt” as Gabriel Oak once did.

Snape Maltings