You know the envelope is being pushed if Wired magazine is talking about the ingredients of beer. In both a fun and science filled article, there is much to learn about malt.
Read the article yourself, but my (3) take-aways were these….
“In 2012, when that initial barley genome paper came out, three-quarters of the worldwide barley crop went to animal feed. Today, 65 percent of the US barley crop is for malting—for eventual purchase by brewers. (About 2 percent goes to distillers…)”
That right there shows the economic power of having over 5K in craft breweries. Individually there might not be economies of scale but overall, wow!
“And, maybe most critically, it has to make better malt. “That basically goes down to what we call modification rates,” Hanning says. That’s modifying starch into sugar. His lab and people working with the American Malting Barley Association will grow up new varieties and measure soluble proteins, levels of beta-glucan, free amino nitrogen, enzymes … all qualities that determine how well a barley will turn into a beer.”
This tells me that the future might include consumers knowing malt varietals as much as their hop counterparts.
“Stein’s group also learned that huge chunks of genome have what he describes as a “reduced level of diversity.” Which is to say, no matter what strain of barley you’re looking at, big pieces of its genetics are the same as any other strain. No one knows why. “Has selection already brought into combination the best alleles for modern varieties?” Stein says. “Or is this just something that happened because people always selected the same, and there was a domestication bottleneck?” Whether domestication perfected or broke these regions, they’ll make excellent targets for improvement.”
This leads me to worry that without making some quick advancements in agricultural science that malt could be susceptible to a disease or bug unknown to us now.