One of the common elements of growing corn, wheat or soybeans anywhere in Canada is the volume-based market for each. Outside of identity-preserved (IP) varieties in soybeans or silage-specific hybrids in corn, there’s little differentiation. Regardless of the care or management a grower may take with commodity crops, their destination is usually the same — the nearest country elevator, where it’s blended with the harvest of other area growers.
In malting barley, there’s not only differentiation, there’s also an evolution beyond older, more familiar varieties which has been taking shape for the past decade. The two more familiar varieties — AC Metcalfe (registered in 1997) and CDC Copeland (registered in 1999) — are being eclipsed by newer arrivals — AAC Synergy, CDC Fraser, AAC Connect and CDC Churchill. All offer up-to-date genetics, improved disease resistance and better standability. Yet it’s a slow process: CDC Copeland remains the top variety among growers with AAC Synergy (registered in 2012) now the second-most widely grown variety.
Slow acceptance
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It’s a long road to acceptance among growers, but then they’re not the only ones with a vested interest in how varieties gain a preferred status. A malting barley variety has to have the agronomic and disease packages to attract growers, the quality and malting performance that makes it attractive to maltsters, and good brewing performance characteristics and sensory attributes that make it desirable to brewers. It must have all three attributes or it risks losing traction.
“It’s one of the most difficult things that we face as an industry, and the intrinsic quality of a new malting barley variety is hard to assess initially,” says Peter Watts, managing director with the Canadian Malting Barley Technical Centre (CMBTC).
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For example, new wheat varieties are assessed and evaluated before they’re registered. A variety might yield well in test plots but if the end-users find it of poor milling or baking quality, it will never find its way into growers’ fields.
Although malting barley varieties are also evaluated before registration, the commercial evaluation by maltsters and brewers can take up to four years while sufficient volumes are produced for testing. In spite of that commitment, it can still be rejected.
“We get samples of new varieties and so do the commercial entities,” says Watts. “We test them at a micro and pilot scale and evaluate them to see how they perform. We have a sense of how they perform, but processing 50 kilograms of a sample and processing 250 tonnes are two completely different scenarios. It can take a couple of crop years of different qualities at a commercial scale for maltsters and brewers to fully understand how a variety performs.”
Consistent beer taste
The goal is consistency with any variety, whether it’s CDC Copeland or AAC Synergy or one of the new options like CDC Churchill. For growers, it’s the consistency of yield and performance in the field. For maltsters and the larger-scale brewers, it’s consistency that translates into a beer that tastes the same, time after time.
Finding that consistency can be an extensive and expensive process. Watts says it can take years to ramp up production, all while testing for the proper traits. But it also requires contributions from public sector breeding and research programs. Growers, government, processors and end-users all invest in development of new varieties, so there’s a need to capitalize and garner a return on investment with newer genetics, improved yields and better disease packages.
“We’re not going to stay competitive with countries like Australia or France or Argentina if we don’t continue to advance our genetics,” says Watts. “Crops like wheat are increasing their yields with new varieties. Farmers could say, ‘I can grow a hard red spring wheat at 65 bushels per acre which is a 25 per cent improvement in yield in the last 10 or 15 years, but with barley, I’ve seen a 15 per cent improvement in yields, so I’ll grow wheat instead’. To keep barley competitive, we need to get these new varieties accepted but it’s particularly complicated in malting barley for those reasons.”
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Supporting the future
Todd Hyra echoes Watts’s comment about remaining competitive and has fielded growers’ questions about staying with CDC Copeland or AC Metcalfe. He agrees that the new barley varieties need to compete or else farmers will stop growing them.
“Those four new products that are coming along offer a yield bump over Copeland of eight to 10 per cent in many cases, and compared to Metcalfe, it’d be 14 to 18 per cent higher yield,” says Hyra, western business manager for SeCan. “We have lots of varieties that have malt characteristics, but the final steps are up to the CMBTC.”
At its height, AC Metcalfe was the right product for its time, seeing quicker acceptance alongside CDC Copeland, which struggled initially. They provided consistent flavour and consistent experience in the malthouse which are qualities that are hard to replace. But Metcalfe is now 25 years old and Copeland is 23: it’s time for newer, better varieties that are acceptable to maltsters and brewers.
Commercial varietal development in barley comes with the support of the CMBTC and the Brewing and Malting Barley Research Institute (BMBRI) in Saskatoon, with funding provided collectively from seed companies, growers, maltsters and breweries. Knowing whether a product has the malt extract, the flavour profile, and a not-excessive level of beta-glucans can help ensure a variety will work in a malthouse.
“The growth of a new variety can be exponential, and if participants don’t like it, it’s best to head it off before it gets too big,” says Hyra, explaining that malting barley is identified by variety and malted as an individual product. “They may be blended at some point in time but they’re variety-specific at the outset. The biggest boost we get is when the maltsters are willing to participate and do pilot-scale malts from some of the new varieties in their early stages.”
Most malting barley is grown in Western Canada. Hyra says Eastern Canada’s hot and humid summer remain a limiting factor for its expansion, especially when compared to current traited technologies for corn and soybeans, and higher-than-normal commodity prices. Although malting barley can provide a premium, Hyra acknowledges having it accepted can be what he calls “the malt lottery.”
“The last couple of years with the runup in demand for feed stocks in wheat, barley and oats, it didn’t really matter, and there were some cases where the feed market would pay as much or more than malt,” he says. “Malt’s going to have to see a correction to move back, because I see it as a premium product: it’s not even a food, it’s a luxury item, so it really should capture and reward producers for going above and beyond.”
