“There’s a lot of different things you could do,” Matt Enns says. Every farmer knows that kind of feeling. There aren’t enough hours. There are way more ideas than time to work on them.
“I wish I had eight lives to live to do all the things I want to do,” Enns says. Again, it’s something every farmer knows.
Still, five years into building his Maker’s Malt business, it’s clear Enns has found some kind of recipe, not only for choosing an idea and making it as good as he can, but also for delivering on it. It makes tons of people ask: How did he do it?
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Of course, every story is partly unique. His is too. Enns’s path back to the farm has proved both exceptional and, in retrospect, predictable. How many times have we seen a farm kid set off to see the world only to find, with time and distance, how much the farm really means?
Yet even when Enns began to sense this for himself, he knew that grain growing back home near Rosthern, Sask., wouldn’t be a total answer for him. There had to be more.
It explains how one day in Florida, he suddenly saw an opportunity for a vertically integrated, value-added future on the farm. The answer? The craft malting sector.
That kind of vision is part of what makes him a business success. But only part.
Craft malting was almost unheard of in Canada five to 10 years ago but has become slightly more common since, with dozens of such breweries operating across the country today. As the craft beer boom has exploded in many provinces, most notably and recently in Alberta and Saskatchewan, it has likewise given rise to craft malthouses.
Craft beer is all about small(er) scale, so it is only natural that somewhere along the line, the malting phase of production, would follow suit.
Of course, how these businesses start is often as curious as where they get to, and that’s just the case with Enns, a plucky 43-year-old who does everything with all-or-nothing conviction.
While Enns did enjoy his Prairie upbringing, he never ate, slept and breathed agriculture the way many of his peers did. Growing up, he excelled at music and he still loves to sing and play cello. Physically, too, he was a sports nut and played every game there was, although volleyball was his passion. As a university student, he played for the University of Saskatchewan Huskies’ volleyball team while studying physiotherapy and in 2004, he graduated and capped off his university career with a CIS national championship, the last U of S men’s team to lift the volleyball trophy.
But why was he becoming a physiotherapist? The move, he now knows, was driven by his interest in human anatomy and by the state of farming at the time, and by the fact that he’s fascinated by a lot of things.
“My dad told me 1,000 times, ‘You’re just not really a farmer,’” says Enns. He knew it was meant tongue-in-cheek, but, he says, “At some level you hear that a few times and think, ‘Maybe I better do something else.’”
Enns and his two sisters clearly heard their parents Elmer and Cathy’s plea to leave the farm and explore other opportunities. If they wanted to return home and tend to crops, fine, but not without first seeing what lay beyond the headlands.
Elmer remembered it too when Country Guide asked him. “That was a whole economic time in farming where we had just gone through pretty tough times, barely making a go of it,” he says of the late ’90s and early aughts. “The farm was always there but it shouldn’t be their first choice.”
On and off for 10-plus years, Enns visited the farm and helped when and where he could, but his sports, studies and, later, his career, consumed most of his available time. Yes, Saskatoon was just a 45-minute drive to the farm, but it felt like a world away.
Even so, the siren song of the farm kept calling to Enns the physiotherapist, getting loud enough that he was forced to pay attention in 2010. That year, Aaron Friesen, an elderly mentor and neighbour of his father’s was selling out. Elmer closed one deal with Friesen and opened a new farm venture with his longtime farm partner Jim Flath plus another young area farmer, Chad Krikau, and Enns. (in 2021, Krikau and Flath divested themselves from the farm).
The timing dovetailed with Enns’s decision to pull double duty. “You see something that Dad’s built up and is very successful, and a great example of a western Canadian farm, and you don’t want to see it fade away.”
He balanced life as a physiotherapist and farmer for five more years before letting his licence lapse in 2015, the same year he married his wife Katie Crockett.
Getting crafty
Enns and Crockett routinely holidayed in Florida and it was during a 2015 trip to the Sunshine State that he was exposed to craft beer after joining a social club via Facebook. This was despite the entire notion of craft beer, and beer in general, being somewhat lost on him.
“I saw these guys talking about a beer from five states away that they were excited about,” he remembers. “I’m a Mennonite so we did not grow up with beer at all. Alcohol was not a big thing in our lives. I had some appreciation for it, but very little, and certainly not in the craft sphere.”
He came home with a real value-added idea and, perhaps, just at the right time. Craft beer has exploded in Saskatchewan since 2014 when there were just a half-dozen operations. By the time Enns began his business, that number had increased to 15. Today there are 27.
Value-add pioneers face challenges. What do you do, for instance, when the equipment you have to have simply doesn’t exist? Enns needed a small-scale malting line, and when he couldn’t find anyone who makes brewing equipment who could produce one, he asked himself, if brewers couldn’t, who could?
That’s when they thought of the pharmaceutical industry, which also works with small lots and rigid standards.
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That insight led to a purchase by a combination of Enns, his father Elmer and two silent partners who remain in the business to this day. The four short-ton malting equipment was delivered for harvest 2017 — only the second set-up the company had made for a malter. It was clear they were in uncharted territory. “We were very early,” Enns says.
Excited, though, Enns feverishly began constructing the setup, which, for logistical reasons, was situated in the town of Rosthern.
In short order, all the money was spent on equipment, a building, plumbing, electrical and other accessories.
And that is how Enns began Year One with a buoyant attitude, and $1 million down.
Maker’s Malt was born.
False start
The plant was open for business and Enns had to tame a two-headed dragon of malting and marketing. The former was difficult, but it was a skill he could learn. But marketing? It has no clear path to victory. What should he choose … social media, traditional print media, digital advertising, or something else?
Enns, a talker’s talker, decided an old-school approach was his best bet, so he jumped into his SUV and criss-crossed Saskatchewan to visit every brewer he could find.
Each one he met told him they loved the idea of craft malt. He’d had a hunch they would, even though it was still mostly an idea at that time, so he also sent the brewers a SurveyMonkey, polling them with questions about what they’d want from a craft malthouse.
“I looked at results; some were obvious, some were interesting,” he says. “It gave me the confidence to jump in; certainly it was a leap of faith that some of those things would translate into purchases.”
The rest of the year, he figured out how to malt raw barley well and he worked feverishly to build up stock for his hopeful customers.
Early into 2018, while working flat out, his and Crockett’s twin boys were born just before spring seeding. They would be the source of new-found joy, but also stretch them thin, including Enns, who was farming, malting and now a father.
“I don’t think I had any REM sleep for months,” Enns says.
To tend to his other baby, i.e. the malthouse, Enns would sometimes sleep multiple nights per week on a couch at the plant to manage inevitable kinks or breakdowns on machinery that ran 24/7. The family still lived in Saskatoon — they would later relocate to Rosthern — and Enns commuted out so many times he lost count.
“Things like sales and marketing, I didn’t even do any of that at that time. I just focused on trying to make it work and (produce) high-quality malt. There was such a learning curve. My mentality was, ‘If I do this right, it’s going to work.’”
Breaking through in year two
After 18 months of non-stop testing, finessing and repairs, Enns finally had a winning process with a tight eight-day turnaround to produce a four-tonne batch of various base or specialty malts. His hard work paid off and he quickly created a new problem: too much supply.
“I looked around at lots of pallets. I thought, okay, I have to work on this (marketing) side,” he says. “I focused on sales a lot more. I wasn’t willing to slow down production to reach equilibrium, I had to move enough product to reach equilibrium and run 24/7.”
He updated his list of all the breweries in Saskatchewan and added more from the Winnipeg area. With a plan in place, he hit the road again. Although, this time he brought the show, not just the tell.
Enns created a travel kit of malt where he would perform a hot steep analysis at the brewery and also make a pot of barley tea. “It was a great way to showcase our product,” he says. “Year two was a real year of those connections.”
Brewers were enthusiastic that Maker’s Malt was producing a local product — just like the beers they were producing — and it was backed up with great customer service.
The brewers took note. It was more than just image “Because he can select his own grain off his fields, he can tell you which lot every bag of grain came from,” says Casey Murray, head brewer at 21st Street Brewery in Saskatoon. “I’ve noticed much more consistency.”
Brewers could now buy the same specialty malts that matched or exceeded the quality of what they were buying from the U.K. or Germany, and the malt itself arrived in hours, not weeks. Best of all, they were connected directly to the malthouse.
“You call my cell, you have the grower of the barley, the maltster, the guy that brings it to you, the quality control guy,” says Enns.
As business continued on an upward trajectory, Enns also had made his first HR move, hiring former professional brewer Steve Maier, who was also interested in malting. His deep level of understanding let him connect with brewers in a way Enns couldn’t, which only served to elevate Maker’s Malt even more.
The year finished out with the malthouse eventually hitting equilibrium with output matching sales.
Full stride
As Maker’s crested into its third year and beyond, the focus shifted more toward financial health and efficiency.
They shored up their inventory tracking and invoicing process, which freed up bits of precious time and inched them slightly beyond the “working your tail off” modus operandi.
“Into years three and four we’ve had to tell quite a few people, ‘No, we can’t supply you,’” admits Enns. “I hate doing that. You feel like you’re giving up customers.”
It’s a problem every farmpreneur would welcome, i.e. so much business you have to pick and choose. In practice, the feeling is as bitter as gall.
With an aggressive loan payback plan, Enns is close, but still not in a position to simply jump to the next level, which he says is a play worth somewhere between $5 million and $10 million.
“It’s not a bootstrap at that point,” he says. “It’s a pretty commercial enterprise.”
Nonetheless, he recently pulled off a small-scale expansion. With a Saskatchewan Lean Improvements in Manufacturing grant from the provincial government, Enns expanded capacity by 33 per cent and introduced different automated processes. What once took eight days has now been engineered down to a tight five-day practice where steeping now happens in a separate, parallel system. The best part of the increased capacity is that there were already customers waiting in the wings … yes, the same ones Enns had begrudgingly refused were now able to use Maker’s.
What’s next?
Now into year five, Enns has settled into a predictable yet hectic workflow with a steady stream of more than 20 buyers, although, he always has another pesky chore to tend to, the family farm.
The balance is tenuous.
It’s brought him to a particular conclusion that the current setup is not workable long-term, especially with Maier having moved on earlier in 2022. While the “don’t-count-the-hours” mentality in the early days is often vital to a business start, and certainly was with Maker’s Malt, Enns is intelligent enough to know it won’t work to get to the next level of success, whatever it may look like.
“My time is stretched too thin at this point,” he says flatly. “Elmer would like me to take on more of the farm. In order to do that, I need to find an employee with a really unique set of skills that almost doesn’t exist.”
He’s not afraid to dilute his ownership stake as he believes the only viable way to maintain the farm and malthouse involves less of him and more of another.
“I do have to risk that a bit, or risk the farm side of the equation struggling,” he says. “I don’t want to have to do that, but it’s a difficult thing. The entity is intensive. It’s a lot of time and work.
“But I don’t have eight lives,” he says, “so I’m kinda cramming it in.”
Dad’s dilemma
When Enns returned to the farm, it was because he enjoyed the business and wanted to be back in the mix with his father Elmer, now 67. The move home did carry a certain shock value, though.
“I was somewhat surprised when he came back, to be honest,” says Elmer, adding it was a joyful day when it finally happened.
Though the idea of Maker’s Malt certainly puzzled Elmer due to its novelty, he was taken all the same by his son’s trademark passion and enthusiasm for the malthouse. However, as Maker’s has grown, Elmer plainly saw that the farm and malthouse are two connected-yet-disconnected entities. They can’t co-exist much longer without a change.
“To me, it’s really busy. It’s a very time-demanding thing. Matt has to spend a lot of time developing his market, having meetings, so it’s really a time-grabber. Where I am with my stage in life, there’s going to have to be some decisions made because the farm takes X number of hours and his malt plant takes a bunch of it.
“There’s going to be some things that are going to evolve.”
Elmer is the first to call his son’s drive “commendable,” but is a firm believer that you must put your maximum effort into what is most important.
“He’s a parent of four-year-old twins and a one-and-a-half-year-old son. You have to figure out what’s most important in your life and allot time for that. I like the determination and drive, but there’s a cost to that.”
Currently, Elmer retains two-thirds ownership of the farm and Matt the other 33 per cent, but Enns Sr. believes the ratio must start to shift. And while the sky is the limit in certain ways at Maker’s, nothing happens without a plan.
“There’s lots of room for expansion, but it has to be figured out how,” says Elmer.
Industry voices
Five years ago, there was no such thing as a craft malthouse in Saskatchewan. Today, Maker’s Malt has effectively cornered the market as the province’s leading proponent of it.
Having sold his base and specialty malts to more than 50 different customers, Enns’s malt is the toast of brewers and even a few distillers.
“I can pick up the phone and call Matt directly, having that exchange back and forth,” says Casey Murray, founder and brewmaster of 21st Street Brewery in Saskatoon. “He’s not only the maltster, he’s the farmer. He grew up farming that land. He’s got this extra level of knowledge that is really going right from field into my brewhouse. That’s really valuable for me.”
Similarly, Ryan Moncrieff of Rafter R Brewing Company in Maple Creek, Sask., has been in business since mid-2020, and regularly buys a half-dozen malts from Maker’s.
For Moncrieff and many in the craft brewing world, quality is important, but so is letting customers know there is a local connection, which is rapidly becoming a marketing prerequisite to a younger generation of consumers and beer drinkers alike.
“People like to hear that a good portion of the beer they have in their hand, the grain came from right here in Saskatchewan, from another small producer,” Moncrieff says. “They like to know that we are supporting small business, as well.”
