Homebrewers like to call their malt “grain,” but that would have sounded decidedly strange to Europe’s farmhouse brewers. They grew their own grain, then they malted it themselves—and for them, the difference was about 10 days’ work.
Modern brewing tends to focus on the malt and the wide variety of colors and flavors that the malting process can create. For once, however, let’s talk about where that malt comes from—because farmers still grow all of it.
Farmhouse Perspective
A major part of the reason farmers made beer at all is that they were already growing grain—that was how they got their food. So, the grain was “free,” in the sense that it cost them nothing as long as they had enough left to eat. That meant they were limited to the grain they grew on their own farms.
The main concern when choosing which grain to grow was what type would give the greatest return. That was largely dictated by the climate and the soil. Farmers rarely changed which grain they sowed because they staked not only their livelihoods but their lives and those of their families on every single harvest. Most could survive a bad harvest, but if you make a mistake one year and have bad weather the next two, then suddenly you have a very, very serious problem.
That’s why farmers usually wouldn’t stake everything on a single grain, growing several types instead. A special precaution was to grow sedge—a mix of barley and oats. It was a handy double bet: If the summer turned hot and dry, the barley would do well; if the summer was wet and cool, the oats would thrive.
In a way, the brewing really began with the planting. In some places, the farmer would choose in advance which field would support the grain meant for malting. They wanted thick, fat grain kernels, so they would choose the field most likely to give them that. In late summer, the farmer might inspect that barley field—and, if it looked good, dream of the outstanding beer they planned to brew from it. In western Norway, one farmhouse brewer told me that brewing good beer from the local grain could be challenging—but in years when the weather was right, you could knock it out of the park.
Which Barley to Plant?
In most places, the preferred grain for malt was barley—and, as luck would have it, barley is the most adaptable grain.
Barley could grow farther north, where the summer is short, than other grains. In Norway, the northern limit for growing grain has traditionally been Malangen, at 70° latitude. That’s 1,100 kilometers (more than 680 miles) north of Stockholm. Up there, few farmers could afford to brew from what little grain they grew, so the northern limit for farmhouse brewing was roughly at the Arctic Circle, or 66–67° latitude.
The farmers used barley in Britain, the Low Countries, Germany, Scandinavia, the Baltics, and Belarus, among other places—but in many of these places, they also grew and brewed with other grains. Only in Britain, Denmark, Germany, and Norway (away from the coast) were they reliably, entirely barley-based. (Here, we’re mainly focusing on how it was in the late 19th century based on accounts of farmhouse brewing around then—bearing in mind that the grains farmers choose to grow has changed slowly over time.)
As we know, there are two different kinds of barley: two-row and six-row. Early taxonomy classified them as different species, but today we know the difference is just a single gene—so now they’re one species, Hordeum vulgare. Yet it’s easy to see which is which: An ear of two-row is basically a row of pairs of grains, while six-row consists of triplets. The individual grains are smaller in six-row barley because there’s simply less room.
Today, maltsters worldwide tend to prefer two-row barley. North American brewers once favored six-row—its diastatic power is ideal for converting corn and rice—but in recent decades they’ve moved toward modern two-row varieties. European brewers, meanwhile, use almost exclusively two-row.
Historically, however, European farmers tended to malt six-row barley. Some preferred two-row for its larger grains, while others liked six-row because it germinated more quickly during malting or because it had the most evenly sized grains. A Swedish saying held that “six-row gives much in the sack, but little in drink. Two-row gives less measure, but strong drink.” In short: Because six-row grains are smaller, you get more hulls and less starch, and therefore less sugar, in the same amount of grain.
You’d think that farmers would have a clear preference for two-row barley for their beer, but in Scandinavia, it wasn’t common until the 19th century. So, it may be that some of the resistance was rooted in sheer conservatism.
Photo: Public Domain
Wheat and Rye
Why did farmers prefer barley over wheat for malting? Well, they didn’t necessarily. For one thing, wheat is the most demanding of these grains to grow. Even in southern Sweden, farmers who tried to grow it found that the return could be less than what they sowed—“regret grain,” they called it. You’d have to get farther south, well into Germany and the Low Countries, before wheat was common enough to use some for beer.
Barley is great for beer, but it doesn’t really have that many other uses. Today, what doesn’t become malt usually becomes animal feed because barley doesn’t contain much gluten, so you can’t bake leavened bread with its flour. You can, however, use barley to bake a sort of wafer-thin, tasteless cracker—or, even more exciting, you can make porridge. (How does it sound, to eat that every day? That was life for most farmers in Norway.)
What you need for leavened bread is gluten-rich wheat, or rye. Of course, rye has a stronger flavor, so those who could use wheat for bread preferred that. Thus, Europe ended up with three main bread-baking cultures: wheat bread in the west and south, rye going eastward from Denmark and Germany, and barley and oats in the north, from Ireland to Finland. Many who could grow wheat preferred to make their beer from something else, so they could save the wheat for bread.
In fact, wheat was quite traditional in farmhouse brewing. Only 2 percent of the accounts I’ve collected mention using it—and only in Austria, Estonia, Lithuania, and Sweden. We know wheat was widely used in Belgium’s commercially available farmhouse ales—and in earlier beers sold in continental Europe—but I don’t have much detail about what farmer-brewers themselves used. Wheat also is more common in archaeological finds from southern Europe, such as Spain, Greece, and Serbia—unsurprisingly, perhaps, given how much wheat loves heat.
The farther east you go, the more likely people were to brew from rye. It wasn’t unusual to sow the grain in the fall; leaving it in the ground through the winter gave it a longer growing season, and rye handled cold winters better than other grains. It was also better at growing in poor soil. That farmers brewed with rye doesn’t necessarily mean that they didn’t also grow barley, or that rye is better than barley. Mostly, it means that their rye was better than any barley they were able to grow.
Most flour you buy in the store doesn’t contain any whole grain because mills remove the outer part, the bran. Farmhouse brewers who had to mill their own malt used the whole grain, and rye’s bran turns dark brown when it gets wet. I watched a Russian farmhouse brewer mix water into their milled, homemade rye malt—it looked as white as ordinary flour—and just adding water was enough to turn the whole thing chocolate-brown. Russian farmhouse ales made from pure rye malts are invariably brown—strangely, though, the rye flavor isn’t necessarily that strong.
Oats and More
Oats are an oddball, more like a distant cousin to those other three grains.
In most places, people were clear that oats were not the preferred grain for malting. On the west coast of Norway, however, it grew much better than barley because of the wet, humid climate, so many farmers essentially were forced to use it. There, some farmers would look down on malted oats as a sign of poverty, saying things like, “Oh, it’s just oat beer.” Farmer-brewers in western Sweden also used it, while elsewhere it was rare but not unknown.
Oats germinate more slowly than barley, so in Norway they usually malted it separately from barley. The Swedes, however, figured out that you could steep barley and oats separately, start germinating the oats first, and add the barley later. The difference was sufficiently well known that in Telemark, Norway, they had a saying—“he comes after, like the oat malts”—for people who were slow on the uptake.
In Scotland, the staple was bannock—a flat, unleavened oat bread about a finger thick. In his dictionary, Samuel Johnson famously defined oats as “a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.” This prompted a Scot to retort: “And never did you see such horses, or such men!”
Like wheat, oats add more protein to beer, making it hazier and fuller in the mouth—but they also add fats, which can lead to flavor issues if the fat has time to react with oxygen. The flavor of oats is different, too. I’ve tried experimental farmhouse ale from 100 percent homemade oat malt—it tasted different, but not unpleasant. So, perhaps when people in western Norway looked down on oat beer, they were just being snobs.
Besides the main types of grain, Estonia and Lithuania both have a tradition of brewing with a truly obscure grain: brome. It is widely regarded as a weed, but farmers have sometimes grown it for fodder—and for food, in some places. In Lithuania, some keptinis brewers used malted brome, as did some stone brewers in Estonia. I have no idea what brome beer tastes like. Oddly, though, two accounts mention brewing processes that produce caramel flavors—a possible hint. Why did these brewers choose brome? Unfortunately, they didn’t say.
The situation is very different today. Most farmhouse brewers buy their malt, like homebrewers anywhere else in the world. Yet brewing from locally grown and malted grain is still going on in Stjørdal, Norway, on Gotland in Sweden, in northern Russia, and in parts of the Baltics.
Going to those places to try those beers is an obvious way to taste something like the farmhouse ales of past centuries would have tasted. Here’s another way: grow, malt, and brew with your own.
