A Revolution is Brewing in the US Malting Barley Industry (Part 1)

Sleeping Beauty | After the boom in the hop industry, caused by the craft brewing scene, the barley malting industry is the next sleeping beauty to be awaked. Chris Swersey, Supply Chain Specialist of the Brewers Association, Boulder, USA, sheds a light on recent developments.

We live in exciting times. There’s never been a better time to be a beer drinker – around the world, beer markets have become increasingly segmented and characterized by greater choice of beer style and brand than ever. In most countries, the number of beer producers is currently growing, with brewers challenging existing notions and positing new ideas about what beer can be and engaging beer drinkers in a very diverse and very crowded and competitive marketplace.

Something extraordinary is also happening in the brewery supply chain, especially in the US and Canada. The revolution in our malting barley industry is accelerating before our eyes; it’s happening a bit more slowly than the recent seismic upheaval in the US hop industry (which is another story by itself), but that’s understandable given the relative scales of the two crops, and the fundamentally different structures of their markets and their supplier stakeholder businesses.

A cursory examination of the pace of malting barley variety development compared to that in the hop industry would seem to reveal a relatively static industry. But a deeper dive into the recommended variety list reveals a different story. In the US the list of recommended malting barley varieties is curated American Malting Barley Association, Inc. (AMBA), an industry consortium of maltsters, brewers and more recently distillers [1]. The list serves as a useful proxy for measuring innovation and industry evolution over time. In the ten years leading up to 1980, an average of 0.5 new varieties were added per year, and the list included 16 total varieties: seven 2-Row, nine 6-Row. Whereas in the most recent 10-year period, an average of 1.6 new varieties per year were added, and 2017 list includes 28 total varieties: 20 2-Row, eight 6-Row. The pace of innovation has more than tripled, the number of commercialized varieties has not quite doubled, and the market has shifted toward dominance by 2-Row barley varieties.

Over 150 beer styles are brewed and sold in the US. A quick visual scan of beer styles side by side shows a diversity of appearance rivaling a painter’s pallet [2]. When it comes to appearance alone, malt is the primary decider in beer; and the flavor outcomes are just as stark if you’re paying attention. Which you must do, because the beer drinker most certainly is. Malt is sexy, and is getting its due from brewers and consumers. By force of economic habit, brewers and maltsters are rightly obsessed with extract content in malt; but malt delivers so much more than just fermentable sugar into a beer, attributes which turn out to be critically important to brewery customers.

But this article is focused more on base malt than the specialty malts that provide hue and their expected assertive flavors. Our industry now understands that well-made, high quality base malts imbue distinctive flavor outcomes in beer, and not simply due to differences in fermentability or malthouse practice [3]. Not only is the maltster rightly getting his or her due, but so are grower practice, terroir, variety and Mother Nature.

This article includes a series of observations made by Brewers Association staff while monitoring the US brewing industry supply chain, and over several cumulative decades of homebrewing and commercial brewing experience, accessing and brewing with hundreds of different ingredients, and assessing their impacts on beer flavor across dozens of styles. These observations are certainly not the gospel; they are opinions, reflecting current thinking, offered sincerely into the fabric of brewing industry dialogue.

In 2014, Brewers Association (BA) published a white paper called Malting Barley Characteristics for Craft Brewers (“Characteristics”) [4]. Characteristics was authored by the BA Supply Chain Subcommittee (or as it was known back in 2014 the Pipeline Subcommittee), and was informed by interviews with dozens of brewers, maltsters, growers, breeders, researchers, etc. Characteristics was also informed by an excellent review of the malting barley industry’s recent evolution and current day status [5].

Characteristics includes a gap analysis outlining structural issues within the US malting industry as of 2014; most of these gaps have been addressed in three short years. Characteristics also includes an achievable set of specific malt quality requests for barley varieties better suited for all malt brewing intended for production in North America. Several of the gaps and the primary quality request were flavor related, and therefore they inform one another, and informed the subsequent solutions to those gaps.

Gap Analysis

US Malting Capacity
Strategically speaking the most important structural gap identified in Characteristics back in 2014 was a looming deficit in US malting capacity relative to growing demand, perhaps as much as 25 percent looking out to the year 2020. The malting industry responded to this potential gap with a twelve percent overall increase in US malting capacity in three short years, primarily via enormous capital investments by three very large malting companies: Rahr Malting Co., Great Western Malting and Briess Malt and Ingredients Co. [6, 7, 8]. With their expansion, Rahr’s Shakopee Minnesota installation became the world’s largest single-site malting facility. We’ll discuss the rapid rise of North American craft maltsters and their contribution of approx. 0.5 percent of total capacity later.

Pilot Malting Capacity
Breeding new malting barley varieties can take 10-15 years, and one essential and potentially expensive phase of variety development is commercialization and acceptance of new varieties. In the US this process has traditionally been managed by AMBA, and historically new variety development involved a small handful of large scale brewers who could fund seed increase and many tonne batch size trials of new variety malt production at large malthouses. Until recently pilot malting wasn’t possible in the US, but that has changed with Briess, Great Western and Oregon State University all installing pilot malting systems, and Rahr close behind with their own installation. In theory, this bandwidth will allow breeding to proceed with malthouse evaluation taking place earlier in the development process, at a smaller scale, and at much lower cost. Given that maltster acceptance of new varieties is just as important as brewer and grower acceptance, this development should accelerate the pace of US variety development.

Malt Sensory Tool
The US malting barley industry has historically evaluated the sensory qualities of malt by tasting so-called Congress worts. But Congress worts were never intended for sensory evaluation; their specific gravity is sufficiently high that sweetness overwhelms the remaining sensory attributes which by definition are far more likely to persist in finished, fermented beer than sugar, and the method is time consuming and requires expensive equipment and training to perform. This past year, sensory experts from Briess Malt and Ingredients Co., Chilton, US, and New Belgium Brewing Co., Fort Collins, US, partnered to create the first ever American Society of Brewing Chemists (ASBC) validated method for sensory evaluation of malt. A scaled down version of this so-called “Malt Hot Steep Method” can be found at the Briess website, while the formal validated sensory method titled “Sensory Analysis-14” is now included in the ASBC Methods of Analysis [9, 10]. The method is simple, fast and inexpensive, and can be used by any maltster or brewery of any size to evaluate malt flavor from a purely quality assurance perspective, and to qualify new potential malt supply flavors.

Malt Sensory Lexicon
This gap was directly related to the lack of a malt sensory tool described above, and much progress has been made in a very short time. ASBC sensory subcommittee members and industry partners recently published of a fine structure base malt flavor lexicon tool, called the “Base Malt Flavor Map” [11]. The days of describing malt as simply (and meaninglessly) “malty” are behind us. Maltsters now can and do communicate with brewers via spider diagrams and a rich set of sensory attributes that describe diverse possible flavor outcomes in beer. By leveraging an industry standard malt lexicon, maltsters and brewers can conduct a robust conversation about flavor which simply wasn’t possible until now.

Barley Origins of Beer Flavor

Brewers Association is proud to provide funding for multiple initiatives seeking to understand more about flavor in barley and beer. Knowing how beer flavors arise means more than simply looking at kiln temperature used for malt production, although these are profoundly important deciders. A pair of very recently published research articles focus on the genetic deciders within barley that control beer flavor outcomes, as well as the sensory impacts of malt variety, terroir and malthouse process on beer; as it turns out, all of these factors are significant flavor deciders [12, 13]. This research represents the cutting edge of our industry’s understanding of the many paths through which malt barley influences flavor outcomes in finished beer, and shines a light on many years of future research opportunity and exploration.

Dr. Adam Heuberger at Colorado State University is using metabolomics, a chemical profiling technique to understand how small molecules in malt can impact the flavor profile of finished beer. One study, a collaboration with New Belgium Brewing, evaluated flavor differences in beer brewed from six commercial malts. The six beers each had a unique chemical profile, and differences in flavor were observed over time. For example, Full Pint and Meredith malts produced beers that developed green apple and corn chip flavors, respectively. The study is currently identifying which small molecules in the malt are driving these differences in flavor [14].

Part 2 of this contribution focuses on malt quality requests and the North American barley basket and will be published in BRAUWELT International No. 3, 2018.

Bibliography

1. American Malting Barley Association, Inc. (n.d.): “Recommended Malting Barley Varieties”, URL: http://ambainc.org/content/64/recommended.
2. Brewers Association. (n.d.): “Beer Styles”, URL: https://www.craftbeer.com/beer-styles.
3. Gous, P.; Warren, F.; Mo, O.; Gilbert, R.; Fox, G.: “The Effects of Variable Nitrogen Application on Barley Starch Structure Under Drought Stress”, in: Journal of the Institute of Brewing, 2015, pp. 502-509.
4. Brewers Association 2014: “Malting Barley Characteristics”, URL: https://www.brewersassociation.org/best-practices/malt/malting-barley-characteristics/.
5. Hertrich, J.: “Topics in Brewing: Malting Barley”, in: Master Brewers Association of the Americas Technical Quarterly, 2013, pp. 29-41.
6. Rahr Corporation (n.d.): “Rahr Corporation Celebrates Completion of World’s Largest Single-Site Malting Facility”, URL: https://www.rahr.com/rahr-corporation-celebrates-completion-of-worlds-largest-single-site-malting-facility.
7. “Pocatello’s Great Western Malting plant to receive $75 million expansion”, in: Idaho State Journal, 2015, May 20, URL: https://idahostatejournal.com/search/?sd=desc&l=25&sort=relevance&f=html&t=article%2Cvideo%2Cyoutube%2Ccollection&app=editorial&nsa=eedition&q=Pocatello%27s+Great+Western+Malting+plant+to+receive+%2475+million+expansion.
8. Briess Malt & Ingredients Company, 2015, January 20: “Briess Commissions Third, and Largest, Malthouse”, URL: http://www.brewingwithbriess.com/Assets/PDFs_PR/Briess_PR_2015BriessCommissionsThirdMalthouse.pdf.
9.  Poirier, C.: “Malt Sensory Methods You Can Perform in Your Own Home or Brewery”, 2016, February 16, retrieved from Blogging with Briess, URL: http://blog.brewingwithbriess.com/malt-sensory-methods-you-can-perform-in-your-own-home-or-brewery/.
10. American Society of Brewing Chemists, 2017, retrieved from ASBC Methods of Analysis: Hot Steep Malt Sensory Evaluation Method, URL: http://methods.asbcnet.org/summaries/sensoryanalysis-14.aspx
11. DraughtLab; American Society of Brewing Chemists, 2017: “Base Malt Flavor Map”, retrieved from ASBC Store, URL: http://my.asbcnet.org/ItemDetail?iProductCode=BASEMALTFLAT.
12. Herb, D.; Filichkin, T.; Fisk, S.; Helgerson, L.; Hayes, P.; Meints, B.; Jennings, R.; Monsour, R.; Tynan, S.; Vinkemeier, K.; Romagosa, I.; Moscou, M.; Carey, D.; Thiel, R.; Cistue, L.; Martens, C.; Thomas, W.: “Effects of Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) Variety and Growing Environment on Beer Flavor”, in: Journal of the American Society of Brewing Chemists, 75(4), 2017, pp. 345-353.
13. Herb, D.; Filichkin, T.; Fisk, S.; Helgerson, L.; Hayes, P.; Benson, A.; Vega, V.; Carey, D.; Thiel, R.; Cistue, L.; Jennings, R.; Monsour, R.; Tynan, S.; Vinkemeier, K.; Li, Y.; Nguygen, A.; Onio, A.; Meints, B.; Moscou, M.; Romagosa, I.; Thomas, W.: “Malt Modification and Its Effects on the Contributions of Barley Genotype to Beer Flavor”, in: Journal of the American Society of Brewing Chemists, 75(4), 2017, pp. 354-362.
14. Heuberger, A.: Metabolite Variation in Malting Barley and Influence on Beer Chemistry and Flavor. Craft Brewers Conference, Washington, D.C., 2017.