The battle for the largest single-site malting facility sees a new winner. Rahr Corp., the 169 year old family owned U.S. malting company, just took the crown from Cargill Malt for their enlarged malthouse in Shakopee, Minnesota. The new 115,000-square-foot malt house increases malting capacity at Rahr’s headquarter southwest of downtown Minneapolis by 70,000 metric tons to 460,000 metric tons. This makes it the largest single-site malting facility in the world just 20,000 metric tons ahead of Cargill’s malthouse in Spiritwood, North Dakota.
Rahr also built on the site an 80,000-square-foot distribution and packaging facility for Brewers Supply Group (BSG), a wholly owned subsidiary dedicated to the supply of malt, hops, filtration products and other related brewing material to the U.S. craft brewing market. Furthermore the company built a 20,000-square-foot research brewery and technical center for testing its products under realistic brewing conditions.
In early 2015 William Rahr (48), president and CEO of Rahr Corp. decided to enlarge the existing malting facility at the company’s headquarter. Works started in April 2015 and could be completed six months ahead of schedule.
The Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) awarded $610,000, which is about 9% of the total of $68m, in Job Creation Fund resources to Rahr in April 2015. DEED’s funding approval followed the City of Shakopee’s approval in March 2015 of Rahr’s tax increment financing request.
Rahr is also running a 140,000 mt malthouse in Alix, Alberta and elevator operations in Taft, North Dakota, for the origination and storing of high-quality barley. The company also owns 49 percent of Koda Energy LLC, a biomass cogeneration facility in Shakopee fueled by malting byproducts and other biomass materials.
