The taste of beer is all about the hops.
Wait a minute, that isn’t true, but it’s what millions of beer drinkers believe.
That’s a problem for the barley industry and came up a number of times during the Canadian Barley Symposium and North American Barley Researchers Workshop, held June 25-28 in Winnipeg.
“The hops people describe a lot of the hop aroma, flavour, and they are very much at events (promoting beer), ” said Xiang Yin of Rahr Corporation, a malting company operating in both the United States and Canada.
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“A lot of the consumers didn’t even know there is malt in beer. They think (what they taste in beer) is hops or that hops is the soul of the beer.”
Hundreds of researchers, malting company officials and other members of the barley industry attended the conference in Winnipeg.
It is an unsettling time for the barley industry, with acreage suffering as farmers favour other crops. It comes after decades in which brewers substituted barley with cheaper ingredients and that has, in turn, weakened barley’s hold on the beer market.
As well, beer has been losing market share in consumer liquor sales.
Simultaneously, craft brewers are springing up everywhere in North America and putting a new focus and popularity on the idea of using quality ingredients to make authentic beer.
The conflicting factors of weakening farmer interest in barley and increasing consumer interest in quality beer buffeted many discussions at the conference.
Researchers described widespread efforts to try to improve barley as a crop choice for farmers and to build up its value for maltster and brewers.
But the lack of awareness by beer drinkers about the importance of malt in the flavour of the beers has sparked concerns.
Yin said recent research has shown that different malts can create starkly different beer flavours, but very little research has been done to break apart the chemical components inside malt and barley that produce those different flavours.
“There could be very different flavour profiles and there could be many, many, many compounds we need to identify,” said Yin.
Chris Swersey, the supply chain specialist with the U.S. small-brewer-focused Brewers Association, said his organization is putting money into breaking apart the flavours that barley and malt provide to beer so brewers can develop even more varieties of flavour, and so that drinkers can better understand what they’re getting from barley.
“We’re spending a lot more time on this,” said Swersey.
“What do we mean by flavour? We’re starting to dig into that and getting some really good answers as an industry, whereas three years ago we did not understand that.”
Now 11 of the 13 researchers his organization is working with include flavour as a component of their analysis, he said.
Brewers, especially small and craft brewers, often proclaim their allegiance to the notion of barley-based beer, but they have few details to give the consumer about the flavour provided by barley varieties and malt types in the finished product.
The barley industry hopes it has begun to change that, and it hopes that this will be part of the equation that encourages farmers to keep growing the crop.
