The Local Grain Network
Using Local Ingredients
Editor's Note: An abbreviated version of this article originally appeared in the March/April 2019 issue of The New Brewer.
As beer has become more localized and neighborhood-focused, a growing number of brewers are seeking to match their ingredients to their location, tapping into burgeoning markets for local hops and malt, as well as more exotic ingredients.
From larger craft brands such as Allagash and Oskar Blues all the way down to intimate, on-premise-only breweries, the idea of going local is alluring, but for a variety of reasons. For many, the goal is to support local businesses and the local economy. Allagash Brewing Company in Portland, ME, has made a pledge to use one million pounds of Maine-grown grain per year by 2021. Brewmaster Jason Perkins said they’re ramping up year after year, using 330,000 pounds of local grain in 2018 and plans to use 600,000 pounds in 2019.
“Since our brewery started in 1995, we’ve been huge proponents of giving back to our community. And buying local grain is a direct way to positively affect our local economy,” he said. However, while Maine has historically been a major grain-growing state, malting capacity was very limited until recent years, when Maine Malt House, Blue Ox Malt House and Aurora Mills and Farm opened. “With a concrete pledge, our goal was to give grain producers and maltsters an idea of the demand they’d have, so they could invest in longer-term projects.”
The opportunities to work with local maltsters are proliferating. According to Jen Blair, director of the Craft Maltsters Guild, membership in the guild had increased from eight regular members at inception in 2013 and 46 members in 2014 up to 311 members in 2018, including 64 malthouses in production and 42 international or developing malthouses. (The remainder are allied trade companies or individuals.) Average production for member malthouses is 85 tons annually.
Station 26 Brewing Company has transitioned to using malt from less than 50 miles away in most of their beers. The Denver brewery has been working with Root Shoot Malting in Loveland for their regular base malt, used for upwards of 80 percent of their bill for almost every batch, except for the occasional German lager or other specialty. Owner Justin Baccary said he likes working with Root Shoot for a couple of reasons, the first being that they’re local.
“We like supporting Colorado businesses. We think that to the extent that you’re able to use local ingredients, you should be doing that,” he said. “It comes from their family farm and fields surrounding their family farm. The money that we pay them stays local. We know exactly who we’re dealing with.”
Another big factor is that Station 26 has been able to work with Root Shoot to get “exactly what we want,” Baccary said. Rather than order something out of a catalog that was grown in Canada, malted in the midwest and trucked to a warehouse in Denver, he said they came up with a malt that’s produced to their specification. “You have to make excellent beer, that’s the only way that you can succeed at a brewery,” he said. “We think that the malt we get from Root Shoot is a better product and it makes a better beer.”
Root Shoot co-owner Todd Olander, the fifth generation to run his family farm, said it was a learning experience for everyone as they got a base malt dialed in over six months or so. The brewery adjusted their mash temperature, the distillery adjusted germination and kilning temperatures, and over time they figured out what worked best. “They changed their process a little bit and we changed our process a little bit. It’s been a win-win for everybody,” he said.
Olander is quick to note that local does not necessarily equate to higher quality. He noted that he’s in a part of the country that has historically grown high-quality barley, and that has enabled him to produce high-quality barley. He said that focusing on being a local producer would “pigeonhole” Root Shoot.
“We don’t want to be a boutique malt, we want to be a malt that people use because of the quality,” he said. “You can’t pay a premium for an inferior product.” When looking at local suppliers, brewers should consider the availability quality raw materials. “You can only do so much in the malthouse,” he said.
A virtuous circle
Proximity Malt, with regional malthouses in Colorado and Delaware, is looking to fill a demand in locations where barley has been grown but malting capacity - and therefor access for local users - is limited. Proximity’s Amy Germershausen said, “there was a very vibrant malt demand in these areas. The commercial supply chain didn’t make sense.”
She said the current fragmentation in malting mirrors the way beer production has become less centralized with the rise of the craft market. In the 1980s and 1990s, regional malthouses closed their doors as regional breweries such as Pabst, G. Heilman and Stroh’s were gobbled up by Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors. As craft beer has grown, the consolidation of malting has begun to reverse, allowing maltsters and brewers to remove thousands of miles from their supply chain, reducing emissions and fuel costs.
“There’s a lot of cost in that supply chain,” Germershausen said. “We want to be close to not only our raw material suppliers, but also to our customers. When you can put everybody together like that, it’s a nice virtuous circle.”
Every brewer who has done a tour has been asked the inevitable question: Do you use local hops? But finding a local hop grower can be more challenging, given that hop growing is primarily focused in the northwest - Washington, Oregon and Idaho. A couple of years ago Michigan became the fourth state to establish membership with Hop Growers of America, while there are about 50 individual members outside of the four state associations.
Because hops are very susceptible to downy mildew they tend to struggle in humid environments, but HGA Executive Director Ann George said there are about 30 states where they’ve identified “some level of commercial production,” including one grower in Alaska.
Working with smaller hop growers, local or otherwise, offers specific perks. Hop Head Farms founder Nunzio Pizza said one of the biggest complaints he’s heard from brewers is that larger suppliers can be slow to meet immediate needs, while a small hop grower can react very quickly. “Our size, it allows us to be very nimble,” he said.
Smaller growers are also able to maintain a greater presence in the field and an increased focus on quality, he said. If a grower has 1,000 acres of a particular hop to harvest, with a seven-day window where the hops are at their prime, there can be compromises made where harvest begins early and the hops are vegetal or continues late and the hops develop sulfury or cheesy notes.
Located in Michigan, Hop Head Farms has grown to supply customers across the country and internationally, but they started off in 2011 by relying on the support of local breweries like Founders, Bells and New Holland. Pizza would bring samples of his locally grown Cascade hops to the brewers in the area, and they would smell his hops side-by-side with their contracted hops.
“They said, ‘I like your Cascade better.’ That’s how we sold our first crop,” he said. “One day we’re working in the hop yard, we looked up and saw (Bells Brewery Director of Operations) John Mallet walking around. He was so interested in what we were doing and how we were doing it.”
They continue to sell their hops, as well as hops grown on neighboring farms now, with a focus on quality. “We brought a level of sophistication that was not just par for the market, it was above what the current market was doing,” Pizza said. “We’ve had a local mindset on our farm, but we’re going to go wherever people want quality.”
Beyond Hops and Malt
For some, the question is no long Why go local?” but “How do we do more?” Places such as Scratch Brewing Company and Fullsteam Brewery are focused on developing beers using nontraditional ingredients that reflect a taste of place.
After opening Scratch in 2013 on her business partner’s family property in Ava, Il, Marika Josephson said it was natural to incorporate the ingredients surrounding the brewery, which is literally in the woods, into their beers. Depending on the time of year, they focus a lot on “the flavors and aromas we encounter every day,” she said, including roots, flowers, green flowering plants, nettles, mushroom (with a whole series dedicated to the fungus this year) and lots of different parts of trees, such as leaves, bark, nuts, buds and branches.
In the crowded craft marketplace that exists now, it’s an approach that helps them distinguish themselves from other breweries, she said, and lets brewers offer a window into “what your little nook of the United States is all about.”
Josephson thinks it’s also a good way to create a bigger tent for craft beer drinkers, rather than fighting with other breweries over the same customers. “We need to figure out how to invite other people into our breweries and have them converted into craft beer drinkers, and maybe this is a good way of doing it,” she said.
“We live in a pretty rural area here, and a lot of people who aren’t necessarily craft beer drinkers that live around the corner from us, farmers that we buy some of our ingredients from, come in and they’re trying craft beer for the first time. What we make, even though it’s a little bit off-the-wall for traditional beer, it actually speaks to them a little bit more profoundly because they understand those ingredients. They grew up around them.”
In Durham, N.C., Fullsteam owner Sean Lilly Wilson is running “a distinctly Southern brewery,” and uses a minimum of 10% - but as high as 70-80% - local ingredients in each brew. “We’re trying to build, as much as we can, a local grain bill. We have a harder time finding local hops outside of the fresh-hop season.”
Since opening, Fullsteam has purchased $400,000 of local materials, including value-added products like coffee that was roasted locally. Wilson leans heavily on one-offs and seasonal that use esoteric, foraged ingredients. His goal is to support local foragers, growers and entrepreneurs “to foster opportunity in a post-tobacco South.
“As the South grows, we might be in danger of losing what makes the South unique,” he said. “What does the progressive south look like, and how can we embrace the modern South and still look back at our agricultural traditions and celebrate the flavors and the farms that make this area special?”
As a board member for the local land trust, he and the staff will sometimes wander land conservancy property and find black walnuts, spicebush, hickory nut or goldenrod, incorporating those materials into a beer and sending a portion of the proceeds back to the nonprofit organization. He pays local foragers market price for wild persimmons, which they use in a beer called First Frost. Originally, he would trade beer for fruit, but the equation never worked out to everyone’s satisfaction. “Cash is the great equalizer,” he said. Now they wind up with more persimmons than they know what to do with, and sometimes sell the fruit at cost to other breweries. It’s part of his goal to create a “southern beer economy, not just a southern beer business. We’re excited to see other breweries working with local ingredients.
“The challenge is, What’s next? How do we challenge ourselves, growing further and deepening that relationship with the farmer? I think there’s a lot of opportunity to incorporate it more fully and rigorously in what we do. That’s what’s keeping me up at night.”
Out for a stroll
Eric Steen uses nature hikes to introduce brewers and homebrewers to the idea of place-based beers with his Beers Make By Walking program. Brewers on the hikes learn about the environment they’re in and make a beer inspired by their trip. “Each beer becomes a portrait of that trail at that particular time,” Steen said, and a portion of the proceeds goes to an environmental nonprofit group. He was aiming to do something that got people outside and was environmentally educational when he started the program ten years ago. Beers Made By Walking is not explicitly a foraging program, because many of the locations where the hikes take place do not allow foraging, but foraging is “a natural outcome.
“We might taste a couple things here and there, but that’s it,” he said. “The brewers have the option to go out and forage, but these are public hikes. Probably half of the beers that have come out of this program have foraged elements to them.”
While there are books available for different regions, Steen recommends that inexperienced foragers find a local expert to provide guidance on being safe and responsible, avoiding poisonous plants and not depleting resources for wildlife. “I would never pick anything that you’re not absolutely sure of. Make sure you have someone around who knows,” Steen said.
When setting up a Beers Make By Walking in a new location, he likes to research local environmental nonprofits, looking for programs that have outdoors aspects to their program. “If they’re taking people outside and leading people on hikes, there’s a good chance they know someone who is a naturalist or a botanist,” he said.
At Scratch, Josephson said they always consult the FDA guidelines, but still have recipes that get kicked back to them. “It’s a big challenge for us,” she said. “Some things can be frustrating if you know they’ve been used historically as food ingredients, or even still are. We spend quite a bit of time submitting formulas and frustratingly getting things back that haven’t been approved for one reason or another.”
Steen said the foraged beer approach is good business because “it’s part of the triple bottom line - people, planet, profit. It’s looking at success as more than just a financial bottom line. The template of Beers Made By Walking works because people want to go support nonprofits in their area.” It’s good public relations for the brewery, as well, and creates a unique product. “I think brewers who do intentionally highlight those differences have something to offer customers that’s different. There’s a story element to it and you can connect to it,” he said.
One of Steen’s favorite beers to come out of the program was Deschutes Brewery’s Sagefight, which was originally brewed as a fall one-off for Beers Make By Walking, but became a part of the brewery’s seasonal rotation at their pubs and went into bottles for distribution a few years. “It smelled like the high desert, it was really amazing,” Steen said.
Deschutes Brewmaster Veronica Vega said the beer, an Imperial IPA brewed with sage and juniper, was “unlike anything else we’ve made in terms of flavor. We had a cult following immediately for that beer.” It was available at the pub in Bend for a few years, and Sagefight’s popularity prompted Deschutes to make it one of the first beers in their Just Tapped series.
It was first brewed as a 10-barrel batch in Bend using local foraged sage, inspired by a Beers Made By Walking in the Oregon Badlands Wilderness. Once they scaled it up, she said they had to substitute culinary sage and adjust the hop profile to bring back the minty note that local sage has. “You can’t forage for a 145-barrel batch every other week,” Vega said.
The beer was popular in its first year of distribution, with a couple thousand barrels brewed, but Vega said it didn’t have the same draw with customers when they brought it back, but it’s still brewed once a year at the Deschutes brewpubs where the local aspect has more draw. “It really speaks to people here. It might not mean that much to someone in Pennsylvania,” she said.
It’s not the last of their experimentation with local ingredients, though. Vega said they’ve worked with black raspberries, originally developed at Oregon State University, and have a beer featuring marionberries - “very Oregon” - coming out in the future, as well as a beer using juniper. They also try to keep one beer on at the Bend and Portland brewpubs that use local malt and hops, often Mecca Grade Estate Malt and Oregon Hop Farms.
Small yeast suppliers also offer an opportunity for brewers to look locally. Inland Island, located in Denver, provides a standard array of yeasts, but brewers within 20 miles will receive their yeast via courier, drastically cutting down on shipping costs. For Colorado brewers outside of the Denver metro area, shipping is still lower, but the yeast will sit for an extra day in a warehouse or on a truck. “The biggest difference is if you’re in Denver,” Co-Founder John Giarratano said. “If you’re saving $100 per pitch, that’s going to add up fast. Working with a local supplier is going to save a ton of money.”
His customers can also call him up in a pinch and see what extra yeast he has available, and he can turn around emergency orders the same day. “They can have yeast on their doorstep an hour and a half after they give me that call,” he said. Because of their smaller size, Inland Island can also provide a specific pitch rate for their yeast, compared to larger yeast banks that provide “enough” yeast for a given volume.
For brewers who want to have yeast that is not just grown locally but is a product of the local environment, Bootleg Biology in Nashville provides both traditional brewing yeasts and lab services, but also their Local Yeast Project. Bootleg will bank a brewery’s wild or spontaneous yeast for free and make it available commercially, and has a Backyard Toolkit for anyone wishing to capture and isolate a new strain.
“The vast majority of the cultures that we’ve actually found in the wild that work well in beer are actually cerivisiae cultures. As a pure culture, they’re very similar to handle, their performance is similar to a domestic strain,” he said.
Standing Out
Working with a local supplier is different from dialing up the regional rep for a national company and ordering 20 pallets of malt or a 15-bbl yeast pitch. For Giarratano, being a good neighbor is just a part of their day-to-day business. He works with friends who are brewers; he spends time with them outside of work and knows their kids names. “Most of my customers have my cell number,” he said. “I take ownership of the brewers in Denver who work with me.”
Using local ingredients often means higher costs for materials, so many brewers are looking to tell a story about their ingredients, as well. “We certainly pay Root Shoot more than we would pay for malt from Briess,” Baccary said, so Station 26 notes on their menus which beers use local malt, and they employ blog posts and other social media to promote Root Shoot.
“We’re happy to pay for a better product and one that’s local, and we try to tell that to our customers. I think customers these days care a lot more about stuff like this than even a few years ago, he said. “Part of craft beer is storytelling. People associate with brands for a reason. It’s an authentic story that we can tell people about. We’re trying to make the best beer and we’re trying to tell a story about it.”
Olander at Root Shoot said that “it’s all about giving differentiation for the brewer. Most brewers and distillers don’t have the opportunity to call up the guy that grew the grain or malted it.”
For yeast, Giarratano said the marketing aspect is less pronounced. “It doesn’t seem like people are as willing to tout their yeast supplier, that they’re local, as they are with grain and hops,” he said. “I think that yeast is the least understood and the last ingredient that people talk about. That’’s something that I’m trying to promote.”
Mello at Bootleg said customers who source a unique, local strain have a valuable tool to promote. He’s gotten cultures from a swab of buildings in New Orleans’ French Quarter, and has a brewer in Brooklyn who sourced his yeast from a log. “Right now, people are really trying to find a different way to stand out,” he said. “If you have a yeast strain that nobody else has used before, you can lay claim to that being an entirely unique beer.”