Education

Brought to you by Ballmer Peak Distillery in Lakewood, Colorado, this Sonoran State of Mind cocktail is easy, approachable, and - above all - delicious. It’s a drink you can whip up in your kitchen, take out to the back patio, and sip with your swimsuit on and your feet in a kiddie pool.

This year, the current wheat shortage, and the related potential for severe worldwide food shortages, are acute enough that wheat production, something usually considered quite mundane, is now being covered with no small amount of regularity, and a fair amount of alarm.

We started our Homebrewer Highlights last month in honor of National Homebrew Day. At first, we figured we’d do a short blog post featuring three or four Root Shoot homebrewers and their beer, but as responses came in to the form we sent out, and as we started seeing all the amazing projects homebrewers are tackling with our malt, we decided to extend the project.

A dive into our logo icons.

When your craft-malt certified truck comes in a bright cherry red, adorned with sage, yet beer-y, advice (It’s easier to start the day when you know it will end with beer) and the picture of a friendly mule looking you in the face, well…you must be Bill Benson, owner of Iron Mule Brewery in Castle Rock and one of our favorite malthouse visitors on pick up days.

With summer patios on our mind and so many great distilleries in our Root Shoot family, we’ve decided to collaborate with a few of our amazing partner businesses and post a Cocktail of the Month recipe for you spirit-sippers to try at home. This month, we have a Finglas Dubdair Barrel Aged Gin hoppy paloma from Talnua Distillery.

Joyride Brewing makes the best Kolsch in the world. We mean this quite literally: they took home the gold medal for their Ice Cutter Kölsch in the German-style Kolsch category of the World Beer Cup.

The Gilded Goat opened the doors of its first location, a mid-town Fort Collins brewery in 2017, just a year after Root Shoot began malting, and they started sourcing malt from us right away. Earning the support of a new client is always an honor. Earning the support of The Gilded Goat…well, it was downright flattering.

National Homebrew Day is May 7th, and while we often spend time touting the breweries and distilleries that work with us, we want to take a minute to recognize another group that holds a soft spot in our hearts…the folks that go the extra mile to brew their own beer with our local Root Shoot malt!

It’s spring, it’s finally starting to feel like spring, and we’ve been craving some fresh-tasting beverages for patio sippin’. Luckily, we know lots of great folks who are excellent at putting together tasty cocktails!

May is corn-planting season, and although barley is our key crop (you know we run a malthouse, right?) we have a lot going on when it comes to corn.

Launch Pad Brewery located on South Buckley Road in the largest of the Denver suburbs, is a space-themed brewery founded by a group of friends, flying nerds, and Air Force veterans.  Launched (ha! get it?) in 2015 by best buds David Levesque and Henry Rusch, and later joined by Paul Mahoney, Launch Pad Brewery serves up a huge taplist in an open taproom with a view of the brewhouse behind it.

It is often said that farming is a lesson in patience, but sometimes it feels like a lesson in chaos. Or flexibility. Or creativity.

Lady Justice forms part of a minority of breweries that are female-owned. According to new statistics released by the Brewers Association at the Craft Brewers Conference in September of 2021, female-owned breweries make up 23.7% of all craft breweries. That’s not even a quarter of breweries in a country where women make up over half of the population.

We have a few more weeks until the March equinox, which marks the “official” end of winter. And anyone who’s lived in Colorado for any amount of time know that winter never actually ends in March. In fact, often Father Winter is just biding his time until March, waiting for the birds to sing, the sun to warm a little bit, and folks to get excited about getting outside and then BLAMMO, a foot of snow dropped right before a Monday morning commute and on the first day of your ki

When we started this whole Root Shoot Malting project, we knew that one of our most important priorities as a business would be developing strong relationships with our customers. What we didn’t know was that some of those customers would become family. Chosen family. The Family Jones.

It’s February on the farm, but don’t think for a minute that that means we’re over here sippin’ on stouts with our boots kicked up reading candy heart messages to the cows. Well, maybe the stout part is true. Who doesn’t celebrate stout month?

Our plan for January? focusing on water for a while. We even started a light-hearted introduction to it as our social media focus for January. Wouldn’t Dry January be an ironic theme for a business that depends on the beer and spirit industry? We could make a clever link between the sober (beer-less) Dry January that many participate in and the sobering drought that we are facing this January as farmers.

You see that tent? Actually, it’s not really a tent. It’s a steel-framed storage structure with vinyl walls, but it looks like a tent, and as the saying goes, “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a…tent.” Or something like that. Regardless, that tent represents a significant chunk of our winter work on the farm, as well as the cause for much hair-pulling and (we admit it) a fair amount of adult language.