Brent Manning is unassuming and soft-spoken, but as co-founder of Riverbend Malt House in Asheville, North Carolina, and co-founder of the Craft Maltsters Guild, he’s built great stature as a longtime advocate for small maltsters. He may come to the question with bias—or maybe it’s just uncut optimism—but when asked if these kinds of businesses have the ability to change rural communities, his reply is plain and simple: "It is definitely happening."
The plight of the American farmer is well documented. The USDA reported that farm debt reached record levels in 2022, the most recent year of data available, at $535 billion (+3.3% from 2021), perhaps an unsurprising outcome when most farms lose money. Farmers—like millions of other Americans—need part-time work outside of their own daily responsibilities to make ends meet. But it’s also not impossible to find measures of success even among these mounting challenges. And even if in a small way, it’s coming from malted barley, the small businesses that make brewing malt, and the farmers connected to it all.
Riverbend Malt House's success outside of America’s traditional breadbasket is one example of how small, agricultural value-added industries like craft malting can offer something positive to struggling rural communities and families who work their land. "In the southeast, there is precious little historical evidence of any commercial-scale malting," says Manning. "There is some information about 6-row winter barley being grown in Tennessee, but that was probably agricultural feed."
Despite being a novel concept at the time, the idea of locating Riverbend in North Carolina has opened new opportunities to area farmers by providing a market for malting barley, a premium small-grain crop, where none existed before. Large malthouses have been primarily interested in uniform barley satisfying a narrow range of specifications, grown in recent decades in the Midwest. So, small maltsters like Riverbend provide buyers for malting barley in new geographic areas. At the heart of this shift is the fact that, while many farms are struggling as businesses, there are new outlets for revenue—including growing barley for malting, which can also double as a benefit to the soil that grows other crops.
"In today's farming environment, it is tough to be just a farmer," says Andrew White, co-owner of ASR Grain Company, a farm and grain marketing company. "Any company like Riverbend that can provide guaranteed money at a premium over commodity prices helps."
Craft maltsters typically source their raw materials from local farmers, and that means bringing a kind of crop to parts of America that have not farmed premium grain for at least several decades.
For example, in the Southeast where Riverbend operates, farmers often grow rye as a cover crop—something that isn’t planted for the value of the crop itself, but primarily to slow soil erosion, enhance water retention, and improve soil health. The rye is tilled under; it usually provides no income, though sometimes it can produce feed or be used for straw.
But by working with companies like Riverbend, those farms can now grow malting barley instead, which serves the same role of rejuvenating the soil and provides an additional income between the farms' primary crops. "We pay better than straw," says Manning matter-of-factly. If a farm were to get straw from planting rye, that might yield $200 per acre in revenue. But by planting a winter variety of barley—one that is planted in the fall, lays dormant over the winter, then is harvested in the spring—the farm might get anywhere between $600 and $800 per acre, depending on yield and quality. Some farms have enough time to plant another (nongrain) spring crop that grows over the summer for harvest in the fall. Two crops in one year are obviously better than one, and it also means that because of a commitment to Riverbend or any other small maltster, a farm might have more money later on to invest in both land and equipment.
"Barley is not native to North America," says Joe Hertrich, retired group director of raw materials for Anheuser-Busch. As a personal passion project since retiring, Hertrich has documented the history of barley in the country from the early 1600s to the present day. After being brought to North America by explorers and settlers, barley was grown throughout the American colonies for brewing and animal feed.
Barley farming migrated westward along with colonization. Where there were people, there was barley. "Barley is the most adapted cereal in the world," says Hertrich.
The fact that barley can be grown anywhere does not mean it can be grown profitably everywhere. While very little malting barley is grown in the Northeast today, "New York State was a breadbasket historically," says Manning. But in the early- to mid-1800s, increasing knowledge of enzymes put America's commercial brewers on a path to adjunct brewing. "By 1915, as beer production declined heading into Prohibition, U.S. [beer] production was almost exclusively adjunct lager beer,” Hertrich says. “Ales had been largely eliminated, and less than 10% of the lager beer was all malt."
As adjunct lager proliferated and brewing consolidated among a small number of large brewers like Anheuser-Busch, Coors, Schlitz, and more, these corporations also started dictating malt barley specifications, which would impact brewers for generations. The leading beer companies of the early 20th century wanted high-enzymatic barley to compensate for nonenzymatic adjuncts, and pricing pressure meant farmers needed to focus on high-yielding barley varieties. At the same time, the farms themselves started consolidating. Family farms gave way to corporate operations.
The result was brewers only buying certain types of malt, maltsters buying only certain varieties of barley to make that malt, and—since different barley varieties thrive in different environments—malt barley farming becoming concentrated into certain geographic areas of America, namely Idaho, Montana, and some Midwest states. As powerful brewing companies sought newly engineered ingredients that met their specifications, farms elsewhere could no longer grow malting barley profitably, which changed the economics of the farm. It even changed their agronomics, since barley could no longer be part of the crop rotation. Notably, there has been a shift to corn—for food and ethanol—with the U.S. government providing substantial subsidies.
Craft maltsters can reverse that decades-long trend.
Agriculture is a huge industry. And like many other industries, the various players within it work together to make the system as efficient as possible. This is a good thing when the goal is to feed the nation for as little money as possible. But just as Amazon's low prices come at the expense of small retailers, so too does a fine-tuned agro-industrial complex come at the expense of small farmers.
Small retailers cannot compete against Amazon on price or efficient delivery, but selling a local or handmade product is a way to separate products from what customers can order with one click on an app. For rural farmers, one way to gain an upper hand against their commodity-focused counterparts is to identify their own niche option.
Farms not only need buyers for their products, but they also need a source of seed. And that seed needs to be capable of growing on their land, which has unique soil, unique climate, unique (and highly variable) weather, and unique number of daylight hours. Seed companies will only propagate seed they can sell and breeders will only create crops for which seed companies will purchase the rights. In addition to this pretzel of twisted politics and corporate priorities, barley breeding typically takes at least a decade. So, the barley industry, which is only one small part of the agriculture industry, can only change over long periods of time.
It's not even as simple as "going back to the way things were." As the world has changed over the last several decades, so too have the economics of agriculture. Continuous research into crops has pushed yields upward, but because research ceased on abandoned crops, it’s difficult for the agronomics of old crops to compete against modern ones. Barley that may have been grown in the Northeast in the past cannot simply be planted today, because the seed might no longer be available—and even if it were, expectations of farm yields have shifted. Farmers are more likely to grow whatever is most profitable, and since so much research has been invested in improving the yield of corn and other crops, old barley varieties cannot yield sufficient income to compete. Indeed, in a typical crop rotation, barley is likely to be the least profitable unless there is a premium buyer like a maltster.
The soil and climate have also changed.
Changing the system requires moving all of the parts of the system together. Thankfully, there are those who believe in the importance of saving small farms and are making long-term commitments to reversing the trend to monoculture and industrial farms.
In 2016, Maine's Allagash Brewing made a commitment to increase use of Maine-grown and Maine-malted barley to 1 million pounds per year by 2021. At the time of its promise, the brewery was only using about 65,000 pounds of local barley per year and 1 million pounds wasn’t even available—nor was the capacity from local farmers and maltsters. It was a daring challenge from one of the country’s largest and most influential breweries, but also essential to moving local barley forward.
“For a brewery like Allagash to make a commitment to using local malt sends a significant signal to the rest of the industry in Maine, but they’re nationally respected as well,” Joel Alex, owner of Blue Ox Malt House, shared in 2021 while reflecting on Allagash’s effort. “That’s a huge vote of confidence in us and in craft malt as an industry.”
Because Allagash asserted its brewing and financial weight, it gave certainty to Maine Malt House, Aurora Mills & Farm, Blue Ox Malt House, and Maine Grains to make their own investments in infrastructure and people. Maine Malt House, part of Buck Farms, malts its own grain; Blue Ox contracted with local farms, giving them the confidence that comes from a contracted buyer for their grain.
"Maine has a long history of small grain growth," says Jason Perkins, brewmaster and vice president of brewing operations at Allagash. "People were still growing it for feed, but any malting barley was going to Canada. Given Maine's history, there was local knowledge of malting, so we saw an opportunity to impact our local agricultural community and knew that we could be a catalyst for this."
If agriculture is a big machine, all of the parts need to move in lock step and Allagash's public commitment and subsequent follow-through is a good news story of local farming success. "Now most, if not all, breweries in Maine do some purchasing of grain in Maine," says Perkins.
Ted Hawley is the owner and founder of New York Craft Malt. He is also a fourth-generation farmer and, in 2012, opened the first malthouse in New York State since Prohibition. Though proudly producing malt for the state's breweries, he acknowledges the difficulty in bringing barley back to what was once a breadbasket of America.
"Barley does better in dryer conditions," says Hawley. The moisture in New York State—to the extent the state can even be considered one ecosystem (coastal areas, the Finger Lakes and other areas all have their own environments)—makes New York-grown barley susceptible to head blight, a fungus that causes gushing in beer, and pre-harvest germination, where barley sprouts while still in the field, making it unusable in the malthouse.
This is another example of the difficulty of altering the current state of the agro-industrial complex. The malting barley varieties available today were bred for the Midwest, where the air is drier. Drier air is less welcoming to fungus and, while head blight is a risk wherever barley is grown, it is less so in the Midwest—so breeders only needed to breed so much fungal resistance into barley varieties designed for that region. And dormancy, the period of time a barley kernel needs to rest before it will sprout, has been all but bred out of barley. Maltsters want low dormancy so they can germinate the barley at will. But in moist environments, the lack of dormancy means barley might germinate while it's still in the field—a maltster's nightmare. Needless to say, maltsters will not buy barley that cannot be turned into malt, so if there is too much pre-harvest sprouting, the farmer cannot sell the barley to a maltster and is left with livestock feed once again.
Fortunately, researchers and breeders also see the potential for local malt and are breeding new barley varieties for a broader range of environments.
The barley breeding program at Cornell University was started in response to the passing of New York State's farm brewery legislation in 2012, which gave breweries benefits like tax incentives and access to direct-to-consumer sales if they met certain thresholds for the percentage of New York-grown ingredients they used. "At the time, there was no New York State malt," says Mark Sorrells, professor of plant breeding at Cornell. "So, we asked the legislature for support in research."
Since then, Cornell has released two new spring barley varieties and hopes to release a winter variety in the next year or two. In typical barley breeding, the time from the first cross to a new commercially viable variety is at least 10 years, but Sorrellls and his team released their first variety in five. By focusing on spring varieties, they were able to use both greenhouses and land in New Zealand, which could produce seed during North America's winter in time for trials in North America's spring, to fast-track development. The result was Excelsior Gold, which is now being grown and malted in the Hudson Valley.
"We also use genomic mapping so we can predict the traits that will carry through in new breeds," says Sorrells. While barley breeding has historically been a numbers game of making hundreds of breeds and simply selecting the crosses with promising traits, the team at Cornell can use genomic mapping to predict which crosses have the most likelihood of success, saving time and money.
With spring varieties, the team at Cornell is focused on disease resistance in the northeast's humid environment—scald, spot blotch, and fusarium head blight are the biggest risks—and increasing dormancy, so the barley kernel doesn't sprout while still in the field due to moisture levels shifting in the fall (typically a signal to the barley that it's time to grow).
Breeding new winter barley varieties takes longer and the problems are different, so it’s taken Sorrells' team longer to release a new variety, but they are working on it—the New York State climate is so varied that there are many problems to solve. With winter varieties, the biggest problem is to increase hardiness; the barley needs to survive during the coldest months. But there are many different reasons why a barley plant might die over winter. A wet fall may spread disease that weakens the barley to the point where it cannot survive a harsh winter, or a spring freeze/thaw cycle might kill a crop. Because these conditions cannot be replicated in a greenhouse or in New Zealand, winter barley varieties can only be tested in the field, which means one test per year.
But winter barley varieties are important because they protect the soil, just as they are being used in the area around Riverbend's malt house in North Carolina. While Cornell is a relative newcomer to barley breeding, there are research projects across America, generally focused on creating barley varieties appropriate for the regions that surround them. There are breeding programs in Montana, Oregon, Minnesota, Michigan, North Dakota, Ohio, and elsewhere. The era of a handful of barley varieties trying to serve all uses for all brewers may be coming to an end.
The American Malting Barley Association (AMBA) aids and evaluates research into malting barley varieties. It also creates an annual list of recommended barley varieties for farmers to grow. "I think it's already changing," says Scott Heisel, president of the association, referring to the limited number of barley varieties maltsters will accept and the resulting geographic limits on where malting barley can be grown. AMBA was founded in 1982, so the change Heisel is noticing today, relative to forty years ago, is remarkable in both research and the number of new varieties available.
"With winter varieties, it is possible to double crop in some regions," says Heisel. A winter barley can come off the soil in spring with enough season left to plant a short-season crop like soy. This is what Manning and White are seeing in the south, but new, hardier winter varieties will help farmers in the north. Profitability of farms is often marginal, so the extra income from an additional crop can make a huge difference. The problem is "feed barley is not economic," says Heisel. "So being able to grow malting barley is a great opportunity."
Thanks to new barley varieties bred for a broader range of environments and thanks to craft maltsters creating a market for these varieties, Heisel says he is witnessing regions that had been growing feed barley—Maryland and Delaware, for example—switching to malting barley. And while Heisel and Manning both say the economics of barley farming are already improving, AMBA is currently evaluating over 30 new malting barley varieties that are in the pipeline. AMBA’s current list of recommended varieties is only 41, and those were developed over the preceding decades, so 30 new varieties show that the best is yet to come.
Regardless of who you talk to involved in breeding, farming, and malting new barley varieties, it quickly becomes clear that they are all driven by the same motivation: trying to make farming viable in new ways for a new generation.
Words by Don TseIllustrations by Colette Holston
