CAPTIVATE Project and Horizon 2020
The Project and The Solution
CAPTIVATE is a “Craft Malting Process Innovation for a Competitive and Collaborative Rural Economy”. Building on our global micro maltings business. Custom Laboratory Products Ltd (“CLP”) has applied its 30 years’ sector knowledge to develop a highly innovative craft malting process, suitable for on-farm use.
In 2014, both Europe’s farming and food sectors provided 7% of all jobs and generated 6% of European gross domestic product. But global competition, industrialisation, urban expansion, increasing and diversifying demands of a growing world population, resource scarcity and climate change are a challenge for the sector’s prosperity. In Europe, between 2005-13, the number of farm holdings fell by 3.7% and the number of agricultural workers fell by 12.8%, indicating a long-term decline in the sector and a trend for bigger farms.
Farmers, particularly SMEs, lack the infrastructure to add value to their crops themselves, resulting in them taking the smallest margins for their crops, from large companies who will process, distribute and sell them. They need innovative solutions to help them diversify, collaborate and grow.
CAPTIVATE presents such a solution, providing arable farmers the opportunity to access the growing, global craft malt market directly and empowering them to capitalise on the success of the craft beer market by creating a new craft malt market, providing a local solution from grain to glass. In addition, it will also enable farmers to grow across traditional boundaries by selling high value malt rather than low value barley directly to the end-users within the brewery, distilling and food sectors.
The overall objective for the project is to refine, scale up, bring to technological maturity and commercial readiness a larger (2.5 tonne), modular and more cost-effective version of our prototype. Doing so will empower farmers to add value to their barley, driving cooperative, shared economic development in the rural economy.
Development, Building and Testing Gallery
The Innovation and The Benefits
The main innovation of CAPTIVATE is the scalability of our proven modular 2.5 tonne system, with one kiln being able to support as many as 6 Steep/Germinators in one single system. As the system is scalable, farmers can select the production capacity that gives the best return on investment, and will grow and be able to add capacity according to evolving, local market needs.
CAPTIVATE will empower farmers to capitalise on the craft beer market success by creating a new craft malt market which will be cost effective for farmers, in addition to being cost effective, automated, reliable, safe, secure, producing consistently high-quality malt which will provide rapid payback to users.
Final Test with CM1250SG - Amazing engineering and results
CAPTIVATE: Our Commercial Range is Born
Curio Malting is very pleased to announce to the world the birth of our Commercial Range. Over 30 years of experience in malting and engineering were put into the CM1250 equipment development, and it has most definitely paid off.
The latest tests had produced malt of extremely good quality, and the system itself brings what no other systems brings to the market: it is scalable, functional, control is user-friendly and the process is operational-friendly - as it doesn't require the use of forklifts for movement of the steep-germinator drum.
Our Commercial Range has been the star of the show and the interest it has generated worldwide specially from farmers and business-minded people has been amazing. We are looking forward to sharing our - and their success - as soon as our equipment is up and running. Stay tuned in our social media, blog and events for our big launch.