The Restoration of Warminster Maltings
The repair and restoration of Warminster Maltings
By Robin Appel
(From BHS Newsletter no.110, September 2025)
On the overcast morning of February 14th 2001, the very first day of my custody of Britain’s oldest working maltings, the whole place looked very sad indeed. Above what is now our offices, a large chunk of the roof was completely missing and every other roof was littered with broken and missing tiles. What guttering remained was hanging off the fascia boards, window frames were rotting away, as were the door frames and the doors themselves. That all the woodwork had been painted in ‘battleship grey’ did nothing to enhance its appearance. None of this, I felt, could be excused - the buildings were Grade 2 listed - but it could be explained; the maltings had been on the condemned list for the last 30 years. But, quite remarkably, it had survived. I was now very determined that, at last, it would be granted a reprieve!
You could say I got lucky, because it was only just over a year later, in 2002, that Gordon Brown’s April Budget announced ‘Progressive Beer Duty’, which opened the door wide to a whole swathe of new-build smaller breweries. Individually, their malt requirements were all very modest - no more than 1 tonne per week, or per fortnight - but very precise: a range of different malts, malts that needed to be crushed, packed in 25kgs sacks, and delivered fresh ready for the mash tun. This was not a market that most of the UK malt capacity was geared up for. So the phones at Warminster Maltings began to ‘ring off the hook’! This was exactly what we wanted, it all matched our business model and it stayed that way for the next 10 years.
What this meant was the business was quickly profitable and I could begin to invest in repairing and restoring our malt houses. We began at the front in the summer of 2003, creating new office space and supporting facilities, along with space for visitors, mostly prospective customers, which had now become a frequent occurrence. This first project turned out to be one of our most expensive, not least because the roof of kiln 1, immediately adjacent, but not part of our plan, chose to collapse at the same time. So we had to rebuild that too.
You could say our 24 years programme was punctuated by four major roofing projects, eleven separate roofs in all. The second of these was in 2009, when we stripped all four roofs of the germination floors, and set about repairing all the ‘A’ frames and rafters, which were all in a very poor state. We were under strict instructions from Historic England that the original timbers, as much as possible, had to be retained. So, much bracing of new with old was required, in order to make our structures safe.
The third was what we term as ‘The Old Store’, where the barley is stored above the steeping cisterns. This full width slate covered roof also included ‘the Sweater Kiln’ for drying the barley immediately adjacent. We took this opportunity to remove the brick furnace from the base of the kiln, as it was of no historical value and we have three other older models anyway. We now had space to increase storage capacity and install 4 x 35 tonne malt storage bins in the kiln instead, a hugely valuable addition to our cramped capacity.
At the same time as these major projects, involving outside contractors, much other work was also continually taking place, carried out by our own staff. I am talking about all the windows which we fabricated ourselves, including restoring the wooden mullions, each exactly four inches apart, as laid down 200 years ago, by the strict regulations of the Malt Tax. Some of these windows also required replacement of the surrounding stoneware and all those on the germination floors needed new hatches on the inside, courtesy of which the temperatures and humidity on the floors are controlled. And the list goes on.
However, our final roofing project, which we have just completed, has to be our most ambitious. We have restored the original pyramid style kiln roofs to kilns 3 and 4, which were burnt down in a major fire in 1924. They were replaced then by ‘hipped’ roofs, with a flue running the full length of the apex. We sought planning permission from both Wiltshire County Council and Historic England. Both agreed it was an exciting project and permission was granted in 2018. But, unfortunately, Covid got in the way! So we have only just finished the work.
However, under these new kiln roofs, we now have two new accessible spaces which is going to house our ‘Maltings Museum’. We have over the years, collected, acquired and been gifted all manner of items of memorabilia, which we can now bring out of hiding. For example: ‘Boby Barrows’, for moving the ‘green malt’ across the floors. We have one with wire spoked wheels, very unusual. We have one of the ‘Market Desks’ from Ipswich Corn Exchange, dating back to the 1940s. We also have a Merchants Market Case, 1960, for carrying barley samples, to go with it. Then we have a 200 year old hand operated ‘Winnowing Machine’ for separating the chaff from the grain, following hand threshing. Painted on one side, in olde English script, is the name of its former owner/operator ‘T Petherbridge Agent Warminster’. Agent is another name for a Corn Factor or Corn Merchant. The machine is in a poor state of repair, but we have just been given all 12 volumes of the “Cyclopedia of Modern Agriculture” dated 1908-10, and in volume 12 is an ‘exploded drawing’ of the very same ‘Winnowing Machine’, with all the moving parts labelled. So, perhaps, now we can repair it? All in all we have between 20 and 30 display items for our museum, which will now form part of our visitor experience.
You see, our maltings is our shop window and it has always been our plan to dress it accordingly. But we do not want to be seen as a working museum, because we are quite definitely not that. We make malt the traditional way, and we want to show respect for that method. We believe our malt is superior to ‘commercial malt’ (a term the whisky industry has conjured up for pneumatic malt), and our customers continually acknowledge that it is.
Not only that, we believe that the future of craft brewing does depend on maintaining the moral high ground through associations with desirable qualities such as local, artisanal, and sustainable. We are doing our best to deliver all this and all the time we can, we are confident we have a robust and viable future. It is absolutely vital to maintaining everything that we have achieved so far, and to everything we look forward to achieving in the future.
Robin Appel