Wolverhampton and Dudley’s Lichfield Maltings are situated on Birmingham Road, just outside the town centre. At the front is a red brick Victorian House, the brewer’s house, all that remains of the Brewery of which the maltings was once a part. The brewery has long gone and the maltings was bought from Peachs just after World War Two.
This is a much smaller maltings than those at Langley being just a single building. The malthouse is constructed of red brick with a slate roof. The whole building is well constructed and with some nice details, for example the wooden stairs inside, and outside there is decorative brickwork on the kilns and under the eves there are dentil courses of brickwork in the bays between the piers. The windows are in every other bay and thus in the bays with the decorative brickwork.
There are just five employees here.
Again our visit started with the modern barley storage unit which had been added to the original brick building in the 1970s. There are twenty 65 tonne storage bins and each is numbered. From the top floor of the barley storage building one has good view over the town.
We then went on to see the rest of the malting, and went in by a well-secured door in the main part of the malthouse. The steeps are at the opposite end of the building from the barley storage and malt kiln. Again there are cast iron hopper bottomed steeps, just two, with the last steeping in them when we went round. The steeping cisterns were made by Buxton and Thornley of Burton-on-Trent, a well-known firm producing malting and brewing equipment. The top part of the steeps are located on the barley storage floor which is wooden board floor. Outside at this end of the maltings are reed beds, contained in wooden ‘boxes’, which reduce the steep water effluent so that the waste water can be returned to the system in good condition.
The germination floors of which there are three are of red quarry tiles and they make a good contrast with the yellow of the growing barley. There is an air conditioning unit. Unfortunately it broke down in this last summer and so the men had to work in the hot weather of 2005 with no air conditioning - not an enviable job.
Originally there were two malt kilns as indicated by the two pyramidal roof structures with their square cowls. Now there is just one kiln although it is divided into two. Each half has a wedge wire drying floor which a few years ago replaced the original perforated tiles by Stanley Bros of Nuneaton. Some of the tiles were still to be found neatly arranged along the outside of the kiln. Each side of the kiln has a turner. The kiln was loaded by Boby barrow being placed under the hopper and then the green malt was barrowed across the kiln floor until it was fully loaded. There are wooden doors onto the kiln drying floor and also at the opposite side to unload the kiln. The doors are metal lined on the inside. There is now just a single Suxé anthracite furnace for the whole kiln.
Finally we went up to the top floor, another wooden barley storage floor above the steeps. It has a queen post roof structure.
15 to 16 tonnes of steeped barley results in 13 to 14 tons of malt off the kilns, a weight loss in malting of two tonnes. There is no on site screening of the malt which is dropped from a hopper, located between the main, old, building, and the modern barley storage block, into lorries for delivery direct to the brewery.
Around the building there was a variety of equipment including two barrows from Crisps maltings in Norfolk, malt ploughs, again known here as “shufflersâ€, a Robinson turner, a machine rather like a lawn mower held vertically and used for turning the grain, and power shovels for moving the green malt off the growing floor to the elevators for delivery to the kiln. There were no traditional wide bladed malt shovels.
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