Malting barley varieties like AAC Synergy are a popular choice in the Prairies but are not particularly suited for Atlantic Canada conditions, so researchers are looking to European heritage barleys to serve a growing east coast craft beer industry. Agriculture Canada is looking at heritage barley from the United Kingdom, France and Russia to adapt varieties for the Maritimes’ malting and brewing industry.
“We originally got some varieties from the John Innes Centre in the southern United Kingdom,” said Aaron Mills, research scientist at Ag Canada in Charlottetown, P.E.I.
He said a project ran out of the University of North Dakota found that European varieties tend to perform better in the Maritimes compared to western Canadian varieties.
“We look to Europe for more barley varieties rather than Western Canada, just purely because they’ve been selected under higher moisture conditions,” Mills said.
“We also struggle with protein here. Any fertility goes straight to the protein in Eastern Canada and we found the European varieties can handle a higher level of nitrogen fertility.”
Each year, malt barley is reportedly farmed on roughly 1,000 acres in the Maritimes, according to him. AAC Synergy, Harrington, Cerveza, and AC Newdale are just a few of the varieties that are primarily dedicated to western Canadian cultivars.
Since the 1930s, the majority of the heritage varieties used in the trials haven’t been grown commercially, and they don’t produce as much as more recent malt varieties created for large-scale brewers.
Mills claimed they aren’t as shiny as some of the western Canadian malting lines since they didn’t come from contemporary breeding programmes and weren’t modernized. However, they might possess traits that help them thrive more readily on the East Coast. Additionally, they could have distinctive flavours that appeal to brewers and maltsters who operate on a smaller scale.
“The craft industry, they’re interested in different things like flavour and the story behind how some of these varieties came to be malting barley,” Mills said.
The historical variety known as Chevallier is one of the variations being evaluated. It was first created in the UK in 1870 and is typically found in IPAs and golden ales.
Chevallier has been extensively available in both Europe and North America since it was first commercialized by Crisp Malting in the United Kingdom.
“There were 80 different lines that we started with and we’ve gradually been paring those down, based largely on agronomic performance and disease resistance,” Mills said. “The folks in Brandon are also running some fusarium trials for us out there.”
Since the initiative began six years ago, it has focused on around 30 different lines.
“We started with 70 or 80 grams of seed and we’re just propagating those up,” Mills said. “I couldn’t honestly see any one of these varieties being more than say 50 to 100 acres at their peak.”
“We’re working with a craft malt house and the craft brewery and Halifax to pick out the best one. I think we have it down to around seven varieties that they like the stories and the agronomics kind of match up for the growing conditions.”
In a different initiative, Mills and his coworker Jason McCallum are creating the first commercial wild hops cultivars tailored to the Maritimes’ environmental circumstances.
SOURCE: The Western Producer