USA: Great Falls, IMC’s newest malting operation, runs at 95% capacity

IMC is a highly automated malting plant $70 million worth. IMC workers are on the job 24/7 cranking out an average of 13 rail cars loaded with malt each day. Trucks and rail cars bring at least that much in most every day.

After several years of construction and a number of months of "real intense" commissioning work, the IMC plant is humming.

"The last two months, we've run at about 95 percent of capacity," said Gary McLoughlin, the plant manager. "That's not bad. We are running a very aggressive schedule. We are going to achieve 100 percent."

The plant has been brought up to speed in three phases, with each new phase akin to adding a production line. While bringing a new plant up to speed is never easy, McLoughlin noted, the process has gone relatively smoothly.

"We've not dropped a single batch," he said. "We've never had a batch where it had to be discarded."

The plant, which sits east of Highway 87 just north of Great Falls, is the newest of the four operated by IMC in North America. The other plants are in Milwaukee, Winona, Minnesota, and Winnepeg, Manitoba. The Great Falls plant is intended to better serve markets in the western U.S., as well as customers in the Pacific Rim, company officials have said.

IMC is a subsidiary of the French-based Lesaffre Group. Archer Daniels Midland, the large U.S. agri-industrial concern, has been a partner in IMC since 1998.

The Great Falls is the newest IMC malting operation and the first the company has fully constructed.

It's one of the newest, most automated (malt) plants in the world," said Mark Black, IMC's barley procurement and byproducts manager.

The level of automation was apparent during a recent tour. The plant essentially consists of three key components: elevators for storing barley before and after its malted, the malt house, a labyrinth of walkways that weave among steeping and germination vessels, and kilns, which are used to dry the malted barley. A system of conveyors moves grain through the plant.

Missing on the tour were workers. The plant employs 35, which includes everyone from top managers to maintenance workers. With a round-the-clock operation, just eight to 10 workers are at the plant during each shift.

"Every valve and every motor is controlled at a computer screen," said McLoughlin. "There is a high level of control."

IMC produces malt for use in the brewing, distilling and food products industries. The Great Falls plants biggest customers are Anheuser Busch and Miller SAB.

The brewers have specific malt recipes that are loaded into the plant's computers. "The computer will just follow the recipe," said McLoughlin. Brewmasters and others visit the Great Falls plant to taste gold-colored malt extract called wort. "It's one way a brewer will test our malt," said Black. "We have different customers here almost every other week."

Much of the malt produced in Great Falls ends up in lighter, amber-colored beers, including Bud Light or Miller Lite. Other IMC plants focus on producing malt for darker beers.

Along with the big names in brewing, IMC is finding customers among smaller craft brewers around Montana and the West, McLoughlin said. The craft customer list includes California-based Sierra Nevada, and Montana names such as Big Sky Brewing in Missoula and Madison River Brewing in Belgrade.

While IMC produces malt in huge batches — each about 450 tons or about 21,000 bushels of barley — it has the ability to meet the requirements of smaller brewers through blending and adapting some basic malt recipes, officials said.

A batch of malt from the plant goes along way in making beer. The malt in just one of the three "steeping" vessels at the plant is enough to produce about 7 million 12-ounce cans of beer.

The plant uses about 1.2 million gallons of water per day, which comes from Giant Springs and is piped under the Missouri River to the plant.

Currently, about 70 percent of the raw barley used at the plant comes from Montana producers, with the remainder coming from North Dakota, Black said, noting the mix and sources will vary based on changes in crops and quality levels.

IMC contracts with some barley producers in the winter months and also buys barley on the open market.

"Our total customer base right now is about 250," Black said.

Initially, the plant was projected to use about 12 million bushels of barley per year, with growth possibly pushing that total to 16 million bushels, officials have said.

Montana farmers produce varieties of two-row barley, while growers in eastern Montana and North Dakota provide six-row varieties. IMC has plots north of the plant and spread across the region to test other potential varieties.

Barley grown in Montana is less disease prone than that from the Midwest, where humidity is higher.

"We are looking for good six-rows that do well agronomically in Montana," Black said, noting the challenge is mesh the needs of brewers with varieties that can be grown successfully.

"The farmers have been real supportive," Black said. "These guys have been patient. They had to put up with a lot of construction and delays."

14 June, 2006