Growing Barley
Many homebrewers grow their own hops. For interested homebrewers with a little space in their garden, growing your own barley is also a possibility. Last year, I grew barley in my garden and found it to be a rewarding experience.
There are a few good reasons for a homebrewer to grow their own barley. Firstly, and most obviously, you could malt it and use it in your brewing. You can also use unmalted barley as an adjunct in a variety of beers, especially Belgian-inspired beers such as saisons, farmhouse ales or similar brews. Finally, you could grow a little bit of barley simply as decoration and to get a better appreciation for one of the key ingredients in beer.
Barley Biology
Barley (Hordeum vulgare) is a grass and is the fourth most widely-planted cereal in the world (behind corn, rice and wheat). Over half of all barley production is used as animal feed. In the United States, about 40% of all barley is malted for use in the brewing industry and barley is also used as a human food and in the distilling industry. There are varieties of barley that are specifically bred for malting, and crops of malting barley that are acceptable to maltsters generally command higher prices than feed barley.
Barley is widely adapted and can be planted anywhere in the United States. US commercial production is dominated by North Dakota, Montana, Idaho and Washington. Some varieties of barley, called spring barley varieties, are planted in the early spring and mature about 130 days later, depending on environmental conditions. Winter varieties are planted in the late fall, sprout and grow slowly (if at all) over the winter. In spring, development is accelerated and winter barley varieties mature before spring barley. In the United States, most malting barley crops are spring barley varieties.
Brewers divide malting barley varieties into two types — 2-row and 6-row. Two-row barley generally produces plumper kernels with a lower protein content. In Germany, Belgium and England, beer is traditionally made only from two-row barley. In the United States, 6-row barley is used in conjunction with low-protein adjuncts, especially corn and rice, to produce beer with comparable protein levels.
The American Malting Barley Association (AMBA) recommends malting varieties to farmers each year and their 2010 recommendations are summarized in Table 1. The year listed next to the variety gives the first year that the variety was recommended by the AMBA. The amount of US acreage planted with these recommended varieties in 2009 is also given.
Planning and Preparation
Homebrewers looking for sources of barley seed can contact their local agricultural extension. Or, you can look for barley seed in seed catalogues for home gardeners. Barley is not a popular garden crop, however, so finding seed this way can be difficult. I have found that Johnny’s Selected Seeds (www.johnnyseeds.com) carries both Conlon and Robust barley.
If you live in the northern half of the United States, or Canada, find a spring barley variety and plant it in the early spring. Barley can germinate at soil temperatures as low as 34 °F (1 °C). Barley does not tolerate heat well so, if you live in the southern United States, you will be better off planting a winter variety.
Your expected yield is going to depend on a lot of factors. These include the usual things that farmers have to contend with, especially the weather, plus factors unique to growing barley on a small scale. As an extremely small scale barley grower, the amount of loss you experience during harvesting, threshing and winnowing will play a large role in your overall yield. In 2009, I planted about 500 sq. ft. (46 m2) of Robust barley and yielded 6.5 lbs. (2.9 kg) of (reasonably) cleaned barley. However, I experienced significant losses at every step.
Barley does not require excessively rich soil. In fact, too much nitrogen in your soil can lead to unacceptably high protein levels in your barley. If you have reasonably fertile garden soil, you will not need to add any fertilizer. If you are roto-tilling under a little patch of lawn to make room for a barley patch, you may want to add a small amount of balanced granular fertilizer. (Read the instructions and add about half of the recommended amount for garden soil.) Whatever you do, do not add any nitrogen after the plants have reached the three-leaf stage.
You should receive planting instructions from your seed source. These are frequently expressed in pounds per acre or other units that are not very useful on a garden scale. Do the math and reduce the numbers to weight per square foot (or square meter) and use this as a guide. For reference, one acre is 43,560 square feet (or 4,046 m2).
Planting
When planting your barley, you want to spread the seeds out as uniformly as possible. If you have a suitable broadcast spreader, use this to evenly disperse the seed. I planted my barley by hand and came up with the following method for achieving this. To begin, I roto-tilled the garden, then raked the soil as flat as possible with a heavy-duty rake. Rake hard enough to leave little furrows in the ground.
Next, I weighed out the seed and split it into three roughly equal portions. I then walked the length of the section to be planted and broadcast the seed by hand. On the first pass, I simply tried to spread the seed as evenly as possible. On the second pass, I again tried this, but also looked for bare patches that I missed on the first pass. On the third and final pass, I basically tried to fill in any gaps. The final step was to gently rake over the furrows and collapse them, covering the seed.
When you do this, use very short back and forth motions with the rake. If you drag it across several furrows at a time, you will drag seed along with it and leave thick clumps at the end of the rake’s path.
Care
Barley does not require a lot of care, compared to most garden crops. If you thoroughly roto-tilled your soil before planting, the barley should grow quickly enough that weeds will be mostly suppressed. Pull any large weeds that spring up early, but you shouldn’t need to regularly weed your barley during the growing season. Unless you live near barley (or wheat) farms, barley-specific insect pests will likely not be a problem either.
The most important factor to take care of is watering. Ideally, if you get a steady amount of rainfall throughout your growing season (between half and three quarters of an inch per week), your watering needs will be taken care of. Barley does not require a lot of water and many modern barley varieties have some degree of drought tolerance built into them. If you do need to water, it’s best to water your barley thoroughly then let the soil dry out almost completely before watering again.
Maturation
Barley goes through a variety of growth stages before reaching maturity. When it sprouts, a single leaf emerges from the soil and unfurls. In early development, new leaves continue to emerge from the central stem until the plant is a compact “bush,” usually with five leaves. This is sometimes called the rosette stage.
Next, tillers (secondary stems) will start emerging and all the stems will start elongating. The more densely the barley is planted, the fewer tillers will emerge. In the elongation phase, the stem “telescopes” and the distance between the leaves increases as the plant grows vertically. The leaves will also continue to broaden and grow longer during this phase.
Eventually, the head of the barley will emerge and the kernels will start developing. Barley is almost entirely self-fertilized and fertilization will be mostly complete by the time the first bit of the head emerges. Any stress on the plant, from temperatures over 90 °F (32 °C) or water stress, at this point will result in low rates of fertilization. As the kernels develop, they fill with a clear liquid (which is mostly water) that becomes more milky over the next 10 days or so. The white color in this “milk” is starch. The milky stage blends into the “soft dough” stage where the material in the kernel becomes semi-solid. The kernel continues to harden through the “hard dough” stage and eventually the into the hard, mature kernel. This generally takes about 10 days following the milk stage. Once the hard dough stage arrives, the barley begins to lose its green color and the crop quickly turns from a field of green grass into “amber waves of grain.” Once the plants have lost all of their green color and the kernels have dried, the barley is ready to harvest. In the final stages of maturation, do not water your barley.
Harvesting
Commercially grown barley is harvested by combine. At home, you will have to develop a method on your own. What I did in 2009 was invite a friend (John “JB” Brack) over, grab a couple big kitchen knives and harvest handfuls of barley heads. Each of us grabbed a handful of stems to gather the heads together, then cut the stems. The heads were collected in small containers (I used plastic pails). It took most of the morning for both of us to harvest the 500 sq. ft. (46 m2) I had planted, and there were still quite a few stray heads left behind.
Threshing and Winnowing
Once you’ve harvested the barley heads, you need to thresh and winnow the barley. Threshing is the process of breaking the kernels from the rachis and winnowing is the process of separating the unwanted plant material from the kernels.
To thresh and winnow the grain, I took two buckets of equal size — one filled with harvested barley and the other empty — and set them side by side. I donned a pair of heavy work gloves and grabbed a small handful of barley and held it over the empty, receiving bucket. Rubbing my hands together shattered the rachis and I let the kernels and other plant material fall into the receiving bucket. I repeated this until all of the barley had been processed.
To separate the kernel from the other plant material, I took the two buckets and placed the receiving bucket in front of a large fan. I slowly poured the barley from the full bucket. Since kernels are heavier and less likely to be caught by the wind, they fell into the receiving bucket whereas the stalks and broken spikes from the barley heads were blown away. I repeated this several times until the kernels were cleaned.
In each of these steps, there were significant losses. If I tried to crush too large of a handful of grain, some of the heads would remain intact and few kernels would invariably fall outside the receiving bucket. And, every time I poured barley from one bucket to the other, a few seeds would be lost. When threshing and winnowing your grain, there is a tradeoff between quick processing and lessening your losses.
Malting
Once your barley is cleaned, you are ready to malt it. If you don’t plan to malt it right away, store it in a cool, dry place and check on it occasionally, looking for the sights or smell of mold. For information on how to malt at home, see the March-April 2007 issue of BYO (or read the story online at www.byo.com/component/resource/article/1113-malting-your-own-techniques).
In the coming years, I hope to brew some beers made with homegrown barley and hops.
Brewing with Unmalted Malting Barley
You can also use your unmalted barley as an adjunct. You will have to crush it — which will be much more difficult because unmalted barley is much harder than malted barley — and cook it before adding it to your mash. Basically, you’ll need to boil the barley for 15 minutes to soften it and make the starches accessible to the enzymes from your malt. (The gelatinization temperature of barley starch is not the problem here. Starch from unmalted barley would eventually “unwind” if you just stirred it into the mash, but it would take an excessively long time.) When using unmalted barley, don’t expect it to contribute any malted flavors. For best results, use a maximum of 10% in your beer, with the rest of the grain bill consisting of malted grains.
