It is an unusual arrangement, and the northern complex at Castleredmond is the more substantial of the pair, a multiperiod industrial structure that grew steadily across more than a century of barley processing, acquiring new floors, new kilns, and new purposes as the trade demanded.

The oldest part of the complex dates to the late eighteenth century: a long, five-storey gable-ended store orientated east to west, with a hoist and canopy still visible on its southern elevation. Documents held within the building record that the property passed from a John Lapp to a John Anderson in 1791, placing the core structure firmly in the period of Cork's considerable grain trade. By 1842, when the Ordnance Survey mapped the area at six inches to the mile, it was recorded simply as a store. By 1933 the same maps were calling it a malthouse, reflecting either a change of use or a belated accuracy. At the western ends of the main building and a later northern addition, local knowledge places the "steep", the tank or chamber where barley was soaked in water to begin germination, an essential early stage in malting. Two kilns, orientated north to south and fitted with oil-fired furnaces, were added in the late nineteenth century to dry the germinated grain and halt that process at the right moment. A date stone of 1902 on the eastern elevation marks yet another phase of expansion, a double gable-ended five-storey addition distinguished by its cement quoins and brick and cement surrounds. The Bennetts family owned the complex from the early twentieth century until it was acquired by Guinness and Co. Ltd. The quays lying immediately to the south and west say something about how the malt left: by water, outward along the estuary.