Deep in the mighty heart of Boortmalt’s Athy Maltings site, hidden between gargantuan silos and monstrous malting drums is a small, unassuming building sheltering a mini malting plant.

Here, a self contained Boby malting plant was installed by Vickers in the early sixties but superceded before being mothballed in 2008. In 2015 Minch Malt agreed to resurrect the Boby Maltings for the Waterford Whisky project on condition it was used to its optimal capacity of 90 tons over two twin steeping tanks of 45 tons each.

By comparison with the malting taking place across the rest of the site it truly is a drop in the ocean. Just three truckloads – 100 tonnes of unmalted barley – at a time. It is that comparatively micro size that allows us complete control over the malting of barley from each farm, the ability to tweak the malting process to every individual terroir and allow it to express its character most fully. 

Indeed the whole of our operation, from the size of harvest we require per farm, to the number of farms we distil from each year and the quantity of spirit we produce is dictated by the size of the Boby Plant.

Today we share the remarkable story of the Boby firm itself; its highs and lows, its journey from mills to mayors to machine guns and back again, its final demise and its continued existence through rare, small plants like ours.

It isn’t entirely clear precisely when or where Robert Boby was born. His obituary suggests “Standford” (likely Stanford) in Norfolk in August 1814, though a later census of Bury St Edmunds implies a birth year of 1816 somewhere in Suffolk. What is certain is that by the early 1840s he was living in Bury as an assistant Ironmonger, and later partner, of William Groom. Clearly an astute character, by 1843, still in his twenties, Robert had saved enough to buy the business from William.

It was in the 1850s that the seeds of Boby’s agricultural influence truly began to sprout, as the company began production of an Improved Corn Dressing and Winnowing machine based on a corn screen patented by local Chemist Thomas Cooper Bridgman. The machine was designed to separate corn from chaff, and did so so effectively that it won a gold medal at the Chelmsford Show in 1856. In its first year of production Boby and Bridgman sold 200 units. By 1887 the company had sold 13,000.

Boby’s influence on the world of grain agriculture, and its natural next step, brewing and distilling was profound. By 1862 the company was winning medals not only for screening and winnowing but, tellingly, for its Improved Wort Pump, sold to brewers. Edward Greene, founder of the now-monolithic Greene King brewery chain, established in Bury St Edmunds, was obviously impressed; in 1866 he held a dinner in Bury’s Theatre Royal to celebrate his newly-outfitted brewery, Westgate, whose screening and malting equipment had been built entirely by local hero Robert Boby. Indeed the dinner, which also featured Bury engineer George Cornish, was as much a celebration of Bury’s revival as a manufacturing town as it was the completion of a brewery. A revival that was in no small part down to Boby himself. This was the age in which pub and home brewing were largely being replaced by huge brewing and malting operations, and Boby’s innovations were central to that shift.

In 1881 a Boby roller mill was installed at Bruichladdich Distillery in Islay and as testament to its design and  build it is still in use 140 years later.  Strangman’s brewery on Waterford’s Grafton Quay installed the Porteus marque. 

Robert Boby seems to have been the beating heart of Victorian Bury. Records speak of dinners, celebrations, festivities that the company held for its employees and the wider townsfolk. A councillor from 1860, he was elected mayor of Bury St Edmunds for 1883, his popularity with employees underlined by Councillor C Beard’s pronouncement that he “had never heard a man so highly spoken of by his workmen”.

Even a disastrous fire in 1877 couldn’t slow the company down, and again the townspeople of Bury turned out in numbers to save as much of the firm’s buildings as they could, despite heat so intense that the woodwork burned off engines standing away from the blaze in the yard. Several buildings were destroyed completely, but were replaced with new structures so advanced that they were still in place when the company closed down a century later.