Think of malt as the body and hops as the clothes that body wears. This week we sit down with Joel Alex of Blue Ox Malthouse and continue our series looking at the ingredients of beer; water, hops, malt and yeast. We will end this series making a batch of beer ourselves. This episode is full of analogies and new vocabulary work as Joel teaches us all about the process of malting grains. We were in a large warehouse like space that is being turned into an amazing malthouse that will be able to malt 8000 lbs of barely per piece. (The malting term for a batch.) It is a little echoey and there was a love cricket serenading us. We try two different beers this week; both of which didn’t have a name until we got ahold of them. Blue Ox Malthouse (http://www.blueoxmalthouse.com) makes their own beer in order to test their malt so we try out a couple of batches. We not only learn about the process of malting barley but we also learn that Joel can sing. Jen gets to knock another things off her bucket list and Amanda can’t decide between being a cheerleader or Marilyn Monroe. For your weekly dose of youtube clips head over to our website: greatbeeradventure.com/008 Be sure to head over to https://twitter.com/GreatBeerWomen or https://www.facebook.com/greatbeeradventure or comment below and share any embarrassing high school non-beer-drinking; beer stories. (We don’t want Joel to feel embarrassed too long.) Next week we will bring you another episode, this time on yeast! Thanks for joining us, go subscribe and we’ll see you next time! Cheers PS Go check out our beer inspired art (http://bit.ly/GreatBeerArt).