POWER — Farm Power Malt, owned and operated by the Pfeifle family, is planning to expand. While the community Power may seem like just a small town northwest of Great Falls, the family has been exploring the limits of flavor in craft beer and spirits by growing unique grains and turning them into unique malts, and they are now planning to build a distillery.
The Pfeifle family has farmed in Power since 1915. For generations, the Pfeifle family has raised barley for industrial breweries, but for barley to be converted into malt, the Pfeifle family hand-built their own unique malting machine to create higher quality malt.
Ryan Pfeifle explained, "Drums in my opinion are the best way to make a very uniform product you can roll it and keep it mixed well. But because of the industry, because the need for scale, the large malt houses and stuff don't use drums anymore. On our scale, we can use a drum and a drum gives us the ability to experiment on smaller scales and make a very uniform high-quality product, and we can experiment on without worrying about wasting a lot of products."
Through malting, Pfeile is able to establish connections with fellow distillers, including one in Patagonia, Argentina, who will be collaborating with Farm Power Malt in establishing a single malt in Power.
Tomas Serenelli, whose family operates La Alanza, said, "We started distilling in Patagonia in 2011, we grow our barley locally. We process our grain and we mash and process that material, and then distill it, where we concentrate the alcohol in produce the spirit ... Our goal is not to age anything under 10 years, we age everything above that.
Pfeifle noted, "We'll be one of the few in the world, just like them down there that grow the grains, malt the grains, make the whiskey, and age the whiskey all on the farm."
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