CHIMACUM VALLEY GRAINERY GROWS, MALTS AND BREWS THEIR BEER!
Chimacum Valley Grainery was conceived by fourth generation WA wheat farmer Keith Kisler, and by farmwife and community resilience advocate Crystie Kisler. Growing up on an eastern Washington wheat farm, Keith was surrounded by fields of grain that traveled by truck or tanker to feed people around the world. He grew up to be a farmer himself, settling on an organic farm in the Chimacum Valley on the rural, north Olympic Peninsula. And, before or after a long day in the fields, he came to enjoy a hot loaf of bread and cold bottle of beer. A seed of a notion sprouted in his imagination…what would it be like to grow and bake his own bread and to grow and brew his own beer? What would it take to feed the people in his own place?
Keith and Crystie’s farming journey actually began in 2004 with a farm that they named “Finnriver,” after their toddler son River and the son of their original land partners, Finnegan. Finnriver started as a small, organic farm and evolved over the next 20 years into Finnriver Farm & Cidery, one of the first in the PNW new wave of cider projects that helped stimulate the national cider revival.
During the pandemic, Keith had an opportunity to spend more time in the fields with his first farming love— grains. Since 2008, he had been working with the researchers at the WSU Bread Lab based in the Skagit Valley, planting and trialing many varieties of grain that were being selected for restored nutrition and flavor, and for climate resilience in the face of changing environmental conditions. This wide diversity of grains— purple wheat, blue wheat, perennial wheat— was a thrill to a farmer who had grown up in endless fields of single species. It was not long before Keith and Crystie began plotting how to make their crops most accessible to their local community. With the support of a WSDA Processing Infrastructure grant focused on supporting regional food system resilience, the Kislers committed to deepening the project they call Chimacum Valley Grainery by developing and delivering to their community as many products as possible from their locally grown grains. Having committed to organic farming years before, the Kislers knew that small-scale organic operations succeed through relationships and by serving the needs of their place. How would their neighbors be best nourished by their grains? The answers they came up with— stone-milled flour, woodfired sourdough bread and baked goods, and locally grown beer!
Between planting the organic barley and brewing the beer, there was a missing step— malting. In order to operate at a local scale, one that was manageable by Keith and a very small crew, the Kislers installed a small-scale, traditional floor malting facility on the farm. Malting is a form of stimulating the primordial process of plant sprouting— by steeping, germinating and drying grains to activate enzymes. Traditional floor malting starts by soaking the grains in a steep tank, where the seeds start to germinate. At a specific moisture level, the grains are then drained and spread out onto the floor so they can continue to germinate in a thin layer. There the pile is manually raked and turned with a shovel, to keep the sprouting grain loose and aerated. Through malting, enzymes develop within the grain that starts pre-digestion, a biochemistry that makes more nutrition and flavor available when you bake or brew them.
The Grainery is currently malting their own locally grown, organic barley for their own brewing operation, and will be also be developing a range of sprouted grain breads to make more nutritious baked goods.
Malster/brewer Sam Dressler joined the endeavor on 2023 and attended a national Craft Malting Conference and workshop in Portland, Maine, where he was immersed in the world of malting and met helpful mentors like the folks at Admiral Malting in California. Sam grew up in nearby Quilcene and was mentored in beer craft by neighborhood home brewers. He went on to work as one of Finnriver Cidery’s first cidermakers and now, with Keith, has begun malting and returned to brewing. Between the two of them, they are learning how to keep this operation scaled to where they can do it on the farm, following the grain from the field to the glass with their own hands.
With their own organically grown and on-farm, floor malted barley, the Grainery began brewing in Winter of 2024 and just released their first publicly available canned beers in May 2025. Finally, Keith is growing, brewing and enjoying his own beer!
According to Crystie the Grainery is very unique and this beer especially so,
“Both commodity agriculture and the beverage industry have scaled up so much that the distance between farming and beer ‘manufacturing' has grown ever bigger. We wanted to bring it back in — soil sustained, land-based, handled by a few sets of hands— beer at village-scale. Chimacum is our village...Drive down through Center Valley and you travel from the ‘corner store’ to our organic grain fields in a mile and half, and from there it’s another mile to our home farm and the Grainery maltroom and barn brewery. The whole operation is viewable on that 3.5 mile journey. And if you live near by, you’ll see Keith passing by on the tractor in spring, then rolling back and forth on the combine in late summer, then loading the truck in the autumn to bring the grains to Sam, who will spend the rest of the year getting them malted and brewed.”
Chimacum Valley Grainery is a micro-farm-brewery operation, with the intention of giving people on the Peninsula and around Puget Sound an opportunity to taste fine craft beers produced from organically grown grains in an unusually integrated, farm-grounded, place-based brewing model.
CHIMACUM VALLEY BREWERY
We grow, malt and brew this beer!
🍺 Brewed at our farm-based microbrewery on the Olympic Peninsula with certified organic grain varieties we grow in the Chimacum valley.
🍺 Traditionally floor malted in our barn with a slow, hand turned method, for complex malt character in the barley.
🍺 Organically grown by 4th generation WA grain farmer Keith Kisler. Floormalted and brewed by Sam Dressler.
🍺 Unfiltered, untampered brews offering the fullness and flavors of our organic fields.