Brewing Maine’s Future at Blue Ox :Joel Alex

And today we have with us Joel Alex, who is the founder of Blue Ox Malthouse and also a longtime resident of Maine. Enjoyer of Maine education, all things Maine. So welcome and thanks for coming on Radio Maine today. You grew up in Old Town, which is for people who don't know Maine as well, it's kind of Bangor ish area. Yeah, north of Bangor. I grew up about a quarter mile or half mile from the University of Maine in And then you ended up getting your education at Colby? Yeah, so I was fortunate enough to get into Colby College, so I went to college in Waterville and there was definitely a lot of really exciting resources. A great college. I don't think I could get in now. It's definitely become more prestigious since I was there, but it's done a lot of really great things for that area. So I'm really excited. You and I were talking before we started recording about also you've been all over the state. You now live in Biddeford, but you spent time all the way up in limestone, which is very far north. So I guess I'm interested in your journey, and you've also been international because you actually did some of your education was My kind of geographic history was you grew up in Old Town, like you said, and went to school in the Bangor area and was really fortunate at, well, growing up to participate in an organization called CISV. That was a youth education leadership and peace education program. And through that I got to travel a bunch up through high school was at Colby. While at Colby I was fortunate enough to be able to go abroad for a year, studied in Madagascar, studied international kind of conservation and sustainable development. And then the second half of the year I spent in Geneva, Switzerland where I was able to do studies in sort of the international policy arena, kind of see international or sustainable development kind of both ends as you say, on the ground. And then at that kind of high up policy level that year abroad got me really interested in Maine and what it looks like to do sustainable development at home. And so when I came back, I spent the last year at Colby as part of my environmental studies capstone, looking at different energy and force uses and other sort of environmental policy issues here in the state and got really excited about doing economic development work here. I don't think I had that language exactly at the time, but with time I've been able to do that. So yeah, I've traveled all over the state. I mean actually after college I didn't travel very much at all. I went to Farmington for about four, almost five years where I did community organization around mapping and geospatial education and sense of place and worked on a project called Maine Trail Finder, which is really great. Interspersed with that, I did a little work with the Ecology School, which is down near where I am now in Saco teaching ecology to primarily middle schoolers. And after about four years in that community, a lot of my friends were doing food related work. So they were either home sitters themselves, organic farmers, somehow involved in food production or food processing. And I really get excited about working in that space that really connected with this agricultural state that we live in. We talk a lot about forest products, but we have really strong agricultural history here and the idea of economic development, sustainable development, how do we make being part of the food system a viable economic option for these people that are doing this work and create vibrant agricultural working landscapes. So I was toying around with all this thought I would go to grad school and in that process was at a farm for a birthday party potluck and talking to a craft brewer about utilizing local ingredients. And they basically were like, yeah, we have a few people who are trying to do hops but nobody's doing grain. And I can explain that maybe a little bit later, but exactly why they couldn't use that grain. But that set me off on this whole thing. I was planning to go to grad school and do all this other work around food systems and economic development. And that idea of being able to connect Maine grown grains with the craft beer industry and what was happening with the growth there really was exciting. So I then decided to pursue that and you asked me what my geographic history and it's all sort of tied into that because at that point I lived in Old Town, I had gone to school in Waterville, lived in Farmington with a short little bit everywhere else, but a lot of Mainers, I hadn't been to Aroostook County yet, hadn't spent a lot of time really spanning the whole state. And then I decided in pursuing Blue Ox Malthouse, I transitioned out of my position in I left my apartment there for the next 18 months. I was really based out of my car. So it was not true to say that I was living out of my car because I was spending a lot of nights on family and friends couches and in guest rooms. But it was based out of my car driving all over trying to put together the picture of what malting in Maine could look like. That brought me up to Limestone, which you mentioned where I was piloting. I've spent some time in Belfast where I lived with my grandparents or sort of based on my grandparents, spent some time down in Portland. Ultimately where I ended up in the Malthouse is it's at its current location in Lisbon Falls. There's a lot of really great reasons for the business to be in Lisbon and Lisbon Falls for those who might not know. Lisbon Falls is of a village of Lisbon, the town of Lisbon. So we use them interchangeably, but they're the same place. And since then I've lived in Lisbon, I've lived in Topsham and Brunswick and Freeport, Portland. I've sort of moved all over the area and pandemic and a bunch of other reasons. And housing I found myself in Bedford, which is now the community I call home. And I really love it. I'm not sure that a lot of people who are from Maine could say that they have the, I guess, sense of place of the state in its entirety that you've just described. Yeah, it's interesting. I think we are really focused south. And what I mean by that is there's just this pull south, so if you're in York, Kittery, you could be going to Boston a lot anyway, so you've got this pull south. If you're in Portland, you are not often probably going up to Bangor. Freeport is considered maybe close, but we're a little bit north of there. Oh no, we're still south of Freeport. So yeah, so we're still in that bubble of what people in Portland will consider close, but if they're going to do any significant travel outside of Portland, usually it's west towards, I know I have a lot of outdoorsy friends, so they might go into hiking in New Hampshire or they're going south to Boston. Growing up in Bangor, even in Old Town, I knew all the towns south of Old Town to Bangor and even in South, but I couldn't tell you the towns north of me. And then I think if you go up to Aroostook County, it's a similar thing. They know what's up there, but then it's Bangor down to Portland and there's just this willingness to travel. And I think actually there's a study on what's considered local and Maine and Vermont. This is a little bit old at this point, it was a few years ago, but they were looking at what was considered local. And I think it's really funny because people up in Aroostook County consider Aroostook County local people like in Bangor would consider anything Northern Maine, Midcoast that sort of all local people in Portland would consider anything in Maine. Local people in Massachusetts consider Maine local food. People in New York consider Maine local food, but it doesn't go the other direction. So there's definitely this interesting dynamic where even people that are growing up in Maine don't really connect with it. And I think that's what I realized when I was abroad is I was doing an abroad program where I was living with families. I was really focused on understanding these microcultures that existed in each place. Madagascar has 16 ethnic groups, for example, and slightly different languages. Geneva in Switzerland, which has official language of German, French, Italian national languages of Romansh and some very culturally diverse areas with very geographically centered cultures. And I realized that I didn't really know, I couldn't really speak. I knew Maine was different, but I couldn't speak to why. And I really realized I didn't know as much about why Maine was different. And now that was what I was excited to come back and do and really lean into having grown up here. And so yeah, I've sensed, I feel like I really do have a sense of Maine as a place from top to bottom and east to west. It is interesting when you talk about Aroostook County and you talk about the crown of the state where there's a very strong sense of community up in that region and there's a real sense of pride. And I actually think there is that in different pockets and places in Maine. But I think I've sensed it the most up there. And I've often wondered, is it because they are a little bit more remote from other parts of the state and they kind of have to figure out how to get along and how to have a sense of pride in where they are because it's not necessarily an easy place to live, particularly not in the winter, let's just say. Absolutely. I mean that resonates with me. I think I would agree with that. And that's probably in some ways as a state, I think Maine maintains in the last few decades maybe it started to shift a little bit where Maine is more sort of in line with national politics. But I think we have this independent streak in Maine, and I think that is largely because a colony of a colony we've always had to take care of ourselves. And I do think you're right, the further north you go, the more sort of away from the cultural or economic centers you are, the more you have that idea of self-reliance and that idea that we have to take care of ourselves and we have to take care of our community because other people aren't going to take care of ourselves. And I think that leads to a sense of independence, at least to a sense of pride in your community. And I think we've had that as a strong tradition in Maine that has persisted even against more and more connectivity with what's happening everywhere else. I really like the idea that we have becoming increasingly connected and kind of globalized, but also where you're from and where you're raised and where you call home, it still has a pretty significant impact on who you are as a person, which is going to be distinct from even if you're connected with somebody from somebody in a human way, it's going to be very distinct from people who may not be from that same place. And I think there is that interesting kind of tension between those two things that we are very much connected as humans and also in some ways very much distinct. And so to be able to have that respect in both directions, I think when you talk about grains for example, and you talk about you can use these grains, but you can't use these grains, and I think food is a great example of how not everything is. Not every banana is the same banana. Our current economic system does have a lot of benefits, which we all enjoy moving things around. But to that banana to I'm sure some people watching or listening to this will have heard this one before, but that heirloom tomato that you buy at the farmer's market is something you can't get in the store. And the reason is because that heirloom tomato or some of these really local foods that we buy, whether it's a grain or varieties, they don't travel well. So you can't get that tomato because that tomato doesn't ripen evenly or it gets bruised really easy in shipping. And so once it's bruised, it'll start to rot. So it can't be shipped across the country to a store in California in similarly. I mean a lot of our tomatoes and produce comes from out west or from those areas. And varieties that might be really important to local culture might not fit into the needs of the shipping and the economic kind of system we have, which really homogenizes what we think a tomato is or what we think a banana is. To go back to your example or what we think grain is to talk more about what I am or what beer is to just talk about the product made with the product that I make. And I mean, I think that we do have to go onto the beer side of things. Maine brewers have really done a good job at staking out a really strong place as being a leader in beer and then also starting to diversify. I mean the largest brewery in the state right now, Allagash is like a Belgian style brewery with Allagash White, which again, many listeners and watchers will be familiar with, but that's not the domestic Pilsner that everyone expects. So I think people in Maine, maybe it's because of the independent streak will develop. I think we do develop more unique products. We play around a little bit more with foods and things like this, I grains, but yeah, I could really talk for hours and hours and hours about specific grain varieties. And we haven't really gone into the process of what I do yet or anything like that, but I'm going to hold back so I don't go down the rabbit hole. You just let me know what I would love to hear what it is that you do, the process of what you do, and actually different grain varieties, those are all of interest to me because I will say as somebody who I eat primarily vegetables, and so I've had the opportunity to be like a grain is not a grain is not a grain. You have amaranth, you have quinoa, you hagrainve different types of grains. And even amongst amaranths, you're going to have different types of amaranth, let's just say. So that is very interesting to me. But also what is a malthouse? What does that even mean? Yeah, so the spiel that I sort of give, which I think have had a lot of time to hone it in, so to kind of explain what malted grains are, is that malted grains are to beer, what flour to bread. It's a processed grain ingredient. And the reason that you malt the grain, well, let me step back from that. Malting is I, sorry, this might be the first take where we'll redo that. I can take care of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Malting is, Is so malt. The kind of picture explanation that I give a lot of people about what I do is that malted grain is to beer. What flour is to bread, it's a processed grain ingredient, and just like milling grain for bakers, you can malt any grain or really any seed. So you can have a malted barley, a malted wheat, a malted rye, a malted oats, malted, triticale, malted spelt, any grain or seed you can malt. And the reason that we do that is because if you take a raw grain and you crush it up and you add hot water, you get a porridge like oatmeal or a paste, you don't get a fermentable liquid that yeast can then utilize and access starches in order to create a fermented liquid like beer. So what we do in the malting process is we take that raw grain while it's still alive and we hydrate it by soaking it in water. Then that gets the embryo in the grain to start to grow and it changes the chemistry. So it starts to unlock all of those starches and create enzymes that it needs to create the food to grow into a plant that's the same food that the yeast would like to use to make alcohol. So once the embryo has done that work of converting the grain or the starches and freeing those up, we capture the chemistry by baking that grain back down to a dry product. And so we bake that in what we call malt kilns, but it's very lightly baked most of the time. We want to preserve that chemistry and not denature it so we'll, very light temperatures, often not exceeding like 175 degrees Fahrenheit, 180 degrees Fahrenheit. We'll kind of bake that down to a dry product. And then when brewers take that grain, they lightly crush it up, add water to it, you get all these sugars that can dissolve into the solution and take that and then they boil it, add hops, maybe add some other sort of adjunct flavors or characteristics before they pitch the yeast. And that's eventually what becomes beer or can then take it further and distill it. We do actually use a lot of, as a society, we use a lot of malted barley and malted products in baked food goods. Anyone who has any cold cereal almost ubiquitously is eating a malted barley product every day. Anyone who buys any sort of bread from the store, that's maybe not from the bakery section, but even a lot that's in the bakery section is going to have malted barley flour because it adds some sweetness, it adds some color. So it's used in a lot of baked goods for that sweetness and that color, that maltose is that sugar that's named sort of with the malting process and developed a lot there. And we can bake at different temperatures to produce more color or to produce more flavor, to produce more toasty cracker graham cracker kind of flavors. And anyone who is a beer drinker listening or watching this familiar with the different colors of a pilsner or maybe an October fest beer or a stout, the malt lends that color, like that color, unless it's like a cherry fruited beer and it's red if it's anything on that kind of brown from straw up through a dark roasted color that's coming from the malted grain just baked or processed at different temperatures. So anyway, malt is, and all the sugar and alcohol is coming from it. So after water, it's the largest ingredient in beer, but most people don't realize it's in beer because everyone just hears hops. So they're like, what makes a beer hops in water? And I still have, my grandmother passed a couple years ago, but even up to our passing, she'd be like, how's the hops? How are the hops going? I was like, well, they're going great, grandma, thank you. I give her credit for asking, so we'll start with that. Oh no, she was great. I mean, my whole entire family has been super supportive of me. That was something I was going to ask before, which is you grew up in Old Town. I'm assuming there wasn't, there weren't a lot of people wandering around your high school halls saying, I'd like to get into food chemistry and social entrepreneurship and global and economic sustainability. I don't know, maybe there were weren't in my high school. No, there weren't in my high school. So tell me mean, but there must've been something about that sort of family background in that context that caused you to be supported in going this direction. So my mom's side of the family is from Rumford. They worked in the mills over in Rumford and mixture of the Italian side and just some of the other communities that were over in Rumford. I think there's just, especially in the mid-century, you just have a lot of energy and pride and you were mentioning pride in the community and in doing well and investing in children. My dad grew up in Unity, and so he came from, when he was really young, it was still a working dairy farm, and I wish I remembered the variety of cows that he worked with, but he said that his grandfather was one of the last farmers to be working with this one breed of cow in the area. And as he grew up, the dairy farm shut down, but my grandparents still lived and worked on that. So I grew up going to this farm and exploring that and having that connection to just rural agriculture in that sense of place. And this farm had been in the family for years. So I would go up in the attic and you'd find the old hair wreaths that they used to make in the 1800's to preserve hair and the old Civil War swords and things like this. We would sort of go find all those treasures. So there's definitely a strong sense of place that I think I connected to with both of my parents and then my parents themselves after actually graduating Colby, that's where they met. They traveled around. My dad was in the military, but they had an option of I think going to Japan or coming back home to be near family. And they decided to come back home, be near family, and they started a Montessori school in Old Town, which they ran for almost four decades. And I think their desire to really be a part of their community, to really be a part of Maine, to make their community better and their entrepreneurial spirit, I mean, it's not a business in the way that a lot of people think about businesses, but there's probably enough people watching or listening to this who understand that nonprofits are businesses and schools are businesses, and they were able to successfully run that and had thousands of kids in the community go through the school. So I mean, I had that model of change makers and of people that would be that entrepreneurial spirit. I wouldn't that I immediately thought that's what I was going to do. I mean, probably a lot of kids you grow up thinking you're going to do anything but what your parents do. And I did not go into education. My older sister did and she went into education is a great teacher. I took my path that was a little more wandering at first at Colby, one of the great things about going to a liberal arts school and you don't know what you want to do is you get a lot of opportunity to get exposed to a lot of different subjects and different opportunities and to try things. So I initially went in thinking I'd do an anthropology major, then I got really excited about environmental studies growing up in Maine and having access to all this beautiful outdoor space was really important to me growing up. And then as I got into that space and I started to really understand the importance of sustainability, which is really about people, I mean, I think that's missed. People think that sustainability is about the environment, but sustainable development is about not reducing the ability of future people, future generations to meet their needs. So it's about meeting the needs of the present while not compromising the needs of the future. It's people based and that's economic, that's cultural, and then that's ecological. And I think we really focus in on that ecological piece, but as a society, but we need to remember that it's all of those things and that people are the center of what sustainable development is and what sustainability is. And I did some graduate coursework and strategic sustainable development and I was just really interested in that. And it was food systems really piqued my interest because they're connected to everything and we all have, if I wanted to be an educator and to help people understand what sustainability is, food is such a great powerful tool to do that because we all eat, you mentioned already talked about your diet. It's so tied to our personal sense of identity. It's tied very often to the place that we are to the community that we're in. So it's cultural, it's our healthcare, it's tied to our energy, it's tied to just so many different facets of our life and we all have a relationship with it that we interact with every day. So if we can get people to start just thinking about their food as they consume it and not mindlessly consume it, I think they'll start to ask the questions of how is this chip that I am eating produced? Where did this potato initially come from? And I think as we get curious and start asking those questions, we inevitably get to a place where often the food that's better for us is also better for the environment, it's also better for our communities. So I just got really excited about that space and it was paying attention there in a little bit of naivete. And I don't know what, that basically got me to a point where I was at that previously mentioned potluck in Canaan, Maine on a farm and was like, we have this whole missing piece of our food system here in Maine that we could really be increasing the economic viability of our farms. I had friends that were specifically doing dry goods, like grain growing and talking to them and talking to others. One of the big stories I heard was the need for premium mid-size markets because the size of agriculture here is too small. It's too small to compete on a commodity market, but it's large enough that it's really hard to just make your living with a farm if you're only doing farmer's markets, you need, farms are supported by something in that larger size. And so I was like, well, how can I develop mid-size premium markets where you can really increase the economic viability of these farms by providing a high value product or rotation crop? Because one of the great things about grain is that it is a rotation crop with other food stuff. So it's really part of it. And I hear me talking a lot about food. It's just reminding me this thing that I've really been, I think talking a lot about recently, which is as a society, we don't treat or think of beer and alcohol as being food or being part of the food system, but it is a huge part of the food system and the amount of grain used in alcohol, at least in Maine and the Northeast, I think exceeds just the amount used in baking, for example. I mean, we just really have this big opportunity to rethink that and to understand that our alcohol choices and where the ingredients in our alcohol come from and actually affect our communities and can support local agriculture and they can support that in Maine potato or broccoli. Speaking of the county, I mean spent a bunch of time up there because we have, it is changed over the years, but I think some of the more recent numbers that I have is about 54,000 acres in potatoes up in Aroostook County. And those potatoes are grown in rotation with something else. And a lot of the time that's grain and small grains that actually makes Maine the largest producer of small grains in the Northeast because when you get down to other really large agricultural areas like Northern New York and Pennsylvania, corn is kind of king. And in northern Maine because of the potato rotation and historically because of the growing season, corn hasn't done particularly well. So you don't see that as a really staple crop in northern Maine where we have all this scale and agricultural data. So it's like, how do we support that industry? And I saw malting and I was like, ah, that seems like a great idea. Somebody's got to do it. I looked around at the time in 2012 when I was doing this, there was maybe five in North America, five operations, all between three and five years old or younger. The people who started them were home brewers, were environmental consultants, social workers, engineers, former pharmaceutical is the range of people. And I was like, well, if these people can do it, why can't I do it? And then I leaned right in. I sort of jumped in feet first and I've been doing it ever since. Joel, did you go through a Montessori education? I did. I did go through a Montessori education. I was at my parents' school for 9, 10 years before I went to another school. And I think I did say this, and that's why you probably asked is my started the Stillwater Montessori School and that was the school that they ran. And it was an amazing school. It's a very child centered, multi-aged classrooms. You kind of learning with peers, but different peers at different levels. There's a lot of self choice, so there's certainly structure, but you also know that you have to do your reading four times a week, but you get to kind of choose when you're going to do that reading or that you need to have it done by Friday, but between now and then you get to do it. So there's definitely a lot of independence, I think that you can get a lot of one-on-ones. So yeah, I am a product of Montessori education. Well, I asked that because I also went through, at least early on Montessori and I had my kids go through early on Montessori education. And what I liked about it was the fostering of independence, the structure, the fostering of independence, but also in particular the hands-on nature of it. I remember vividly being in Orange Park, kindergarten down in Jacksonville, Florida when my dad was in the Navy. And part of what we did was they showed us how to clean the mirrors and how to set the tables. And so when we think about that as such a kind of basic, what's the big deal? But there's, you're using your hands to do these things and there's a direct output. And so when you're talking to me and you're telling me this story of I'm going to do this thing that has a theoretical base, but I really want to find a very practical ramification of the work that I'm doing to bring that to fruition. And it kind of all seems to make sense from the way you're describing it. Yeah, I've never thought of it exactly in that way tying it to the Montessori school. But you're right, I mean Montessori is great because there's a lot of focus on practical skills pouring not with needles at a very young age, but sewing or making food was making tortillas when we were learning about Mexico, for example, and just all those different connections. The way that I have kind of thought about what you're saying is I mentioned that initially I was going to go to grad school. My plan was to go get an MBA after working in rural Maine as a community organizer, I interacted with hundreds of nonprofits mostly in the conservation space. And my observation for a lot of them was that these are really awesome organizations that are trying to do a of really good in their community and their limited resources, and they could really have a much bigger impact in their mission areas if they just had some more professional skills. And I don't think so much anymore, but certainly 15, 20 years ago, I think there are still this professional skills. Corporate is bad and you don't want that in the nonprofit space, but it's like one thing that one business does really well is bring resources to solve a problem, whether it's producing a widget or providing a service really effective at that. And it's like some of those skills could be really utilized to really help these organizations broaden their impact. And that's kind of got me into social entrepreneurship kind of thinking. So I was going to go back, get an MBA, do some kind of joint degree in food systems and then try to come back. And I thought I would start a nonprofit. I mean, all my background was in education or nonprofit organizations, but then, and I applied, I went through the whole graduate school program. That's what I was in sort of when the malting idea popped up. And once I got all those applications off, I was like, well, what do I do? What do I do if I don't get in? What if I do, if this didn' t happen? And I was like, well, the malting idea was really cool. I mean, I've got a few months. Why don't I just start to explore what that looks like? And by the time I got an acceptance letter from a program, I was way more excited about doing the work than studying the work. And Maine is a really great place for starting something, I believe, because we have so many resources, economic development, resources that are really accessible, really open, and really cost effective or free for people wanting to start and run businesses. So I did a Top gun program through the main center for entrepreneurship, and I got grants from the Maine Technology Institute. I worked with SCORE Mentors, I participated in some other accelerators. I got some grants from the Maine Grain Alli