Maine Is Scaling Up Its Local Grain Economy

Joel Alex didn’t have experience with grain malting or a business background when he launched Blue Ox Malthouse at 27. But he saw a need.

In 2012, Alex met a craft brewer who said he was unable to find local malt, the primary ingredient for beer making, in Maine. Instead, the brewer was buying malt from Canada, via a New York distributor.

That was Alex’s “Aha!” moment. “I said, ‘I want to fix this,’” he recalls. “Somebody had to do it.”

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