Meet Mountain Region Craft Sales Manager: Dustin Craft, Making Malt Sexy

By: Living a Stout Life

 

About Malteurop Malting Company (MMC)

 

We are a collective of craftsmen devoted to making exceptional malt. We are innovators, designers, scientists, farmers, brewers and artists. We are your link from farm to beer, and we want you to know us as a vital part of the craft beer community. 

 

Our business is craft. Our craft is malt. Our malt is your business.

 

Meet Dustin Craft

Dustin’s official title is Craft Sales Manager for the Mountain Region. But if you boil Dustin down to his essence, his role might as easily be titled Chief Problem Solver. He has been with MMC for nearly three years and a half years, assisting customers in Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota.

 

“My role is trying to match people with the best products, making the best fit for their brewery. What malts work for you from a cost perspective, an efficiency perspective, flavor, what fits in with what you do or what you want to do.”

What in your background brought you to selling malt?

“I’ve always liked the blend of art and science, but I can’t draw a straight line with a ruler. I got a double engineering degree in college, but decided I didn’t want to sit in a room and design computer chips and write code.”

 

What Dustin has always loved is solving problems; from his time designing telecommunications networks (when he also became a prolific homebrewer) to becoming a process engineer in both brewing and packaging at Anheuser Busch (AB), where he “weaseled” his way into the brewhouse and eventually became an assistant brewmaster. The idea of facing a problem and figuring out how to solve it is what turns his gears.

 

Dustin’s time at AB set him up to serve a unique position when it comes to selling malt. While at AB, he also helped rewrite the recipes for Elysian Brewing’s popular Space Dust and Immortal IPAs so they could be scaled up for brewing at a larger volume.

 

“I almost see myself as more of a consultant. (When people are having trouble with something) I’ve been fortunate to have a real breadth of experience, so I can usually be like, ‘oh, have you tried this or maybe call this person or this company (for help).’ So I can add some value to the experience whether they buy malt or not. It’s about trying to be a resource for people.

 

“The one constant throughout my career has been: here’s a problem that we don’t know how to fix, figure it out. That’s basically been every job I’ve ever had.”

How did you decide to become a Craft Sales Manager for MMC?

Following several years at Anheuser-Busch, Dustin went to the other end of the brewing spectrum when he took a job at Crooked Stave in Denver.  He had worked on a project at AB-Busch to build a canning line that could fill more than 2,700 cans a minute and used that experience to help Crooked Stave design and build their own canning line while learning a lot more about the unique challenges and rewards of the craft side of the brewing industry.

 

“After Crooked Stave, I was looking for the next adventure.  I saw an ad for a position with Malteurop as a Craft Sales Manager, and I didn’t realize Malteurop sold to craft breweries before that point. We used to get multiple rail cars a day of Malteurop malt at Anheuser-Busch, so I knew that the malt was a good product. I had a lot of experience brewing with it; probably more than almost anyone else.”

What are some of your accomplishments?

While Dustin doesn’t have any official certifications in the brewing industry, in addition to his double-degree in engineering from college, he passed several different areas of Anheuser-Busch’s internal training, which entails coursework that is similar to some of the industry’s top-level programs. What he’s really most proud of, however, is simply making improvements in the brewing industry, helping people achieve their goals.

 

At AB, he did a yeast recovery project. Instead of dumping yeast into the sewer, they collected it and sold it to a company that was making a yeast nutrient. Dustin enjoys being a part of something that makes a company more profitable, but also more sustainable. He enjoys finding solutions that benefit everybody.

 

He’s also quite proud of putting in that canning line at Anheuser-Busch.  Believed to be one of the fastest in the world, it also helped keep more than a dozen people employed full time.

 

“Overall, I’d like to think I’ve had a positive impact on the industry. My whole career has been how do we solve problems that we don’t know how to solve and then how do we get into the right mindset to keep making things better.”

How do you approach your job, and your customers?

Dustin’s breadth of experience carries over into his experiences as a Craft Sales Manager at MMC. More than just being a source for malt, Dustin strives to be a partner with his customers.

 

“It’s a long-term relationship. I want to sell as much malt as I can, but what I really want is customers that we can work with, that we can grow with as we’re developing new products, as we’re developing new barley varieties, as we’re thinking about working with different partners to bring new products on.”

 

One thing Dustin would like to see more of is brewers taking advantage of the resources that MMC has to further the industry.

 

“Don’t treat malt like a commodity. Part of what you pay for is service; take advantage of it. We can be a huge resource and our team can be a partner to you in working through issues in addition to getting you the exact products you need to make yourself more successful.

 

“I like to think that I’ve helped people make some better beer or make the beer that they wanted.”

What do you feel sets MMC apart?

Passion for MMC and the brewing industry as a whole is something that courses through the veins of everyone in the company. Dustin, like everyone else at MMC, believes in what they do and truly wants to help brewers and distillers make great products that represent the craft at which they’ve worked so hard.

 

Dustin came on board at MMC to help achieve its goal of helping its customers create the best beer possible. While it would be easy for him to say, ‘our malt is the best malt in the world and that should be good enough,’ that’s not good enough for him.

 

Yes, he believes whole-heartedly in the malt that MMC produces, but he also believes there is more to the core of the company than simply producing an excellent product.

 

That’s not simply something he or anyone else at the company says, it’s a core tenet of how MMC does business.

 

“There was a lot of time and money invested in making sure that we had people trained right so that we could deliver the level of service that our craft customers need in the way that they need it.

 

“The way we do business and the way we’re set up, the interaction (of problem solving) is built into what we do. It’s not an extra thing. Having that relationship and understanding our customers is an expectation. It’s part of who we are. Being a small team with a big company behind us means that we not only have lots of resources but we also have the flexibility to use them to best benefit our customers.”

Where do you see the future of malting heading?

For a long time, malt was simply a commodity. There wasn’t a lot of thought given to the competing brands who carried similar types of malt other than protein levels, extract, and enzymes. Flavor has hardly been a consideration when it came to the barley itself. 

 

Dustin hopes to change that. “I want to make malt sexy.”

 

He understands why most brewers don’t go out of their way to vet Barley A versus Barley B or why they don’t order several brands of base malt for a taste comparison. But as craft breweries continue to grow in number, Dustin sees the role of malt becoming increasingly important when it comes to creating a beer that sets one brewer apart from another.

 

“That’s only recently become a thing that the greater industry cares what barley tastes like. Part of that is because malting barley is a very small percentage of the barley grown. But I think it’s one of the cool things that we offer. Because we have a (barley) breeding program, we can care about those kinds of things. And the larger barley programs, the university ones, have started to care too. I think that’s the first part of it.

 

“I also think that as brewers become more educated – people care about hops, they care about water chemistry, and they care about yeast strain – I’m hoping that in the next five years people will put a bigger focus on their malt. What they’re buying, how they’re treating it, how they’re using it, making that not a commodity discussion, but what works best for me.”

 

What gets your heart racing more: the science or the beer?

“The science is an enabler for the art. How do I use the science to be more creative in the way that I want?” 

 

Dustin can tell you that the beer he drinks is bred out of a passion for that combination of science and art. Does one really have to choose one over the other?

What’s your favorite style of beer and why?

“I’m one of those people that it depends on the moment. I’ll drink a stout or a porter all year round. I love smoked beer. I love a good pilsner. I like a hazy that finishes dry. I’ll say stuff that finishes dry. I like drinkable beer. I like the beer that’s interesting enough to keep me going, but not overwhelming to my palate.”

If you were a beer, what beer would you be and why?

“I’d be a Schwarzbier. Perhaps a little scary looking for those who are unfamiliar, but for those who look a little deeper an inviting, easy going, yet complex friend you’re happy to spend an afternoon or evening with.”

There are people behind the product. What three words define you, Dustin?

Dustin has billed himself as a problem solver, but that line of work requires a bit more than just working the problem.  Being “inquisitive, light-hearted, and sarcastic” are definitely characteristics that make Dustin the person he is today, both at work and in his personal life.

Any final thought you’d like to leave us on?

In the end, it’s all about how he can help the brewer make the best beer in the industry. 

 

“All I want to see is every brewer do well and get to make the beer that they want to make, and I want to help them on that journey. I don’t know what the industry is going to look like in 5 years or 10 years, but I know it’s going to be awesome. I’m thrilled to be some tiny little cog in that machine to push that forward.”

 

Cheers. To the farmers. The maltsters. The brewers. The Innovators.