The contents of the Anheuser-Busch Moorhead Malt Plant are a bit of a mystery to some Moorhead residents and many of the thousands of drivers that pass by the sprawling 130-acre site every day on Interstate 94. The Grower Days event on July 20 introduced the public and the farmers that grow the barley that the plant converts into malting barley for beer to the inner workings of the plant and featured the beer that the plant’s pale malt helps create.

The malting process takes six to eight days and is done in 9,000-bushel batches. Each batch of malted barley can fill 2 railcars and make millions of bottles of beer. The malted barley is placed in food grade railcars and shipped to Anheuser-Busch breweries across the country, where it is made into Budweiser, Bud Light and other beers the company produces.

“We supply St. Louis with almost 100 percent of their malt,” Senior Maltster Craig Mohr told the media on a tour of the nearly 8-acre plant, located at 2101 26th St. S. in Moorhead on July 20. “The fact is, that if you’re drinking an Anheuser-Busch product here in the Fargo-Moorhead area, you’re going to be drinking an Anheuser-Busch product that came from the St. Louis brewery and you’re going to be drinking an Anheuser-Busch product that was malted here in Moorhead. So that means it was grown here in the Midwest.”

The plant, which opened in the Moorhead industrial park 39 years ago, employs 43 workers and has an annual capacity of 8 million bushels. It sources its malting barley from farmers across the region via sites in West Fargo and Sutton, North Dakota and three locations in Montana.