CL-140 Malts, Monoculture, and Money—The Future of Barley in North America

Some people nerd out about beer in general. Others go wild for water profiles, hop varieties, or yeast strains, but in Don Tse’s experience, not enough people are paying attention to malted barley. It’s something he’s been passionate about for a decade, and a topic he finally gets to explore in-depth in his first piece for Good Beer Hunting.

In that Critical Drinking op-ed, titled “Fight the Power — How Craft Malt Is Central to Taking On Beer’s Industrial Complex,” Don explains how the barley of today shouldn’t be the barley of yesterday. Typical crops are bred to resist disease and blight every few years. But in North America, barley that’s now widely planted  has been around for three decades and is the main source of what’s used for malt in beer recipes. Why? Well, it takes time, money, and a lot of buy-in to change a monoculture crop like barley. That change is finally coming, thanks to investments from researchers at Cornell University, breweries like Allagash, and other forward-thinking farmers ready to make malt craft again. 

In our conversation, you’ll hear Don talk about why it took so long for him to pursue this passion project, why as a Canadian he’s focused on American farmers, why he’s so stoked on things like protein levels and output, and what sort of potential and future he sees in the North American barley industry. He doesn’t expect people to be as nuts about the subject as he is. But he hopes that we’ll all start to care, at least a little, to keep moving craft beer and our shared agricultural future looking bright.