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Video: Watch how Country Malt Group started in a shed and became an America beer supplier success story

June 5, 2023Keith Gribbins

The success story of the Country Malt Group is one of those classic entrepreneurial tales that is great over a beer. So, grab one, and watch this video. In 1995, father and son Claude and Bryan Bechard used their backyard shed in Champlain, New York, to start supplying malt products to the local homebrew community under the name North Country Malt Supply. Today, that company operates 13 distribution centers across North America.

“I think we must have touched a bag maybe 10 times before we sold it originally,” smiles Bryan Bechard, president at Country Malt Group, in the video above. “We started with six bags of malt and no customers.”

The company has grown, evolved and expanded over the past few decades. First off, it’s not just a grain supplier. Country Malt Group is a distributor of malt, hops, yeast, adjuncts, sanitation supplies and a wide variety of beer and distilling products. Today Country Malt Group is the malt and specialty brewing product division of Great Western Malting Co., which is part of the United Malt Group, which is maybe being acquired by Malteries Soufflet — a subsidiary of European agricultural giant InVivo Group. United Malt is the fourth largest commercial maltster globally with 12 processing plants in Canada, United States of America, Australia and the United Kingdom.

Country Malt Group is the exclusive supplier of Great Western Malting and Canada Malting Co. (another United Malt company) products for North American craft brewers and distillers. As mentioned, the Country Malt Group has 13 distribution centers located across North America in places like Chicago, Fletcher, North Carolina (Asheville), Vancouver, Washington, Plant City, Florida (Tampa), and Garland, Texas (Dallas). The Champlain, New York, facility is like a giant 100,000-square-foot facility, and (from the video above) the others look similarly epic.

“Every time I come into one of our warehouses, like I just got a golden ticket on Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory,” says Toby Tucker, director of sales at Country Malt Group, in the video above. “It’s a huge array of product base, and we do our best to be that one-stop shop.”

Buying in bulk has its advantages. At this point in the video, Glen Morrison, distribution center manager with Country Malt Group, discusses how filling up a pallet full of various brewing items (from malt to hops to sanitation supplies) is a great way to save on freight and buy with flexibility. Learn more about Country malt in the video above. It’s an impressive success story.

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