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March 7, 2025

Blue Ox Malthouse takes top honors in international competition

A rake is run through a floor spread with grain. FILE PHOTO / COURTESY Ian Goering Seen here is an example of floor malting at Blue Ox Malthouse, which won top honors at the 2025 Malt Cup Awards.
By Laurie Schreiber

In competition with 34 malthouses from seven countries, Blue Ox Malthouse in Lisbon Falls was awarded two gold medals and Best of Show at the 2025 Malt Cup Awards.

Judges awarded Blue Ox with gold medals for its "floor-malted" Light Munich and Caramel 60 malts. 

Light Munich won bronze at this competition in 2023. The company describes it as a “character-building” malt for many beer styles that yields “notes of lightly toasted bread crust rounded by a deep biscuity sweetness.”

Caramel 60 is Blue Ox’s darkest kilned malt, “with notes of molasses, tobacco and raisins.”

The Light Munich malt went on to win the Best In Show title for 2025.

Two people hold awards.
Photo / Courtesy Gabe Toth
Joel Alex, right holds the Malt Cup.

Malt, made from grains like barley, is a key ingredient in craft beer recipes.

Founded in 2013 by Joel Alex, Blue Ox is Maine's first malting operation. It uses a centuries-old floor-malting method 

“This recognition is validation that we can craft world-class ingredients with Maine-grown grains, which elevate our customers’ products, our farmers’ hard work and our community at large,” said Alex. 

Farms in Maine and beyond, including Porter Farms in Washburn and Aurora Mills & Farm in Linneus, supply the company with barley to the make malt.

Malting is a process of soaking grain, letting it grow and then baking it down. The steps are called “steeping,” “germination” and “kilning.”

In the floor-malting method, Blue Ox does the germination step on a floor while also applying modern methods of precise temperature and moisture controls across every aspect of production, using a proprietary controls system.

Compared with mechanized, automated systems that might be more efficient, floor malting is gentler on the grain, producing a high-quality, consistent product, the company said.

Last fall, Blue Ox, expanded its 7,500-square-foot facility at 41 Capital Ave. in Lisbon Industrial Park to 20,000 square feet, quadrupling the company’s capacity to process 5 million pounds of grain annually and making Blue Ox the largest floor-malting facility outside of Europe, according to the company.

The build-out also augmented Blue Ox’s ability to create malt from a diversity of grains such as barley, wheat, rye, triticale and oats, as well as organic, smoked, custom and soon roasted products, for craft breweries and distilleries across the region and beyond. 

The company supplies malt to roughly 120 producers. 

Blue Ox is among a small fraction entirely dedicated to floor malting techniques, according to the company.

The competition, called the Malt Cup, was hosted by the Craft Maltsters Guild in collaboration with the Montana State University’s barley, malt and brewing quality lab.

It’s the only competition of its kind, according to a news release.

Judging took place from October 2024 to March in cities across North America.

Entries undergo three points-based rounds of blind judging in specific malt style categories. 

This year, 34 malthouses from seven countries submitted 112 malt samples, the most entries ever for the competition.

The Blue Ox team returned to Maine with the traveling Malt Cup. The company has won two awards at the compeition each year for the past three years, scoring medals for its floor malted Caramel 20, Pale Malt and Yankee Pilsner.

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