Malthouse One West

Malthouse One West is the western face of the original malthouse at Mittagong Maltings, completed in August 1899 as the first structure on the Colo Street site. Construction was carried out by Stuart Brothers of Sydney, a firm that had built offices for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney. The bricks were sourced locally from brickworks then operating in Mittagong. Eight months of construction produced a building that Heritage NSW would later describe as Federation Industrial in style, its gabled rooflines and polychrome brickwork giving a factory an almost domestic character. From 1899, Malthouse 1 was the southern anchor of what became a three-malthouse complex. Tooth and Co acquired the operation in 1905 and ran it for the next 75 years as their primary malt supplier. The maltings used traditional floor malting throughout its entire 81-year operational life, a process dependent on the head maltster's expertise with air, water, and temperature rather than mechanised control. A fire in 1969 permanently closed Malthouse 1. Internal fittings were removed, though the column grid and the floor it carries remained. A Tooth and Co photograph dated 11 December 1969, held at the ANU Noel Butlin Archives Centre, documents the damage as it was left. Production on the wider site continued in Malthouses 2 and 3 until 1980, when Tooth and Co ceased operations entirely. This photograph, made in 2014, records what remained: dark columns rising in a close grid across the ground floor, their silhouettes cutting against a white brick wall lit from broken windows beyond, the floor above still carried on those columns. The building had been standing in this condition for 45 years by the time the frame was made. The Maltings is the only remaining example of a traditional maltings manufacturing facility in Australia. The approved redevelopment requires heritage conditions to retain the first two full rows of cast iron columns in the ground floor of Malthouse 1, eight columns in total, should structural integrity allow.