Barley shortage has craft beer makers foaming

When its in all italics, I feel like I'm reading it as the wind is blowing.

 

Other articles have stated that there is 2013 barley in stockpiles that has not been malted, if that takes up the slack is unknown. Nothing much has been said about the European crop.

The harvests in the southern hemisphere will be soon, of course shipping adds to cost.

 

Well, you could've just clicked the link he provided...

 

I was lucky enough to be in barley country this past summer. Barley country is beautiful. Grand Teton Brewing sits right at the foot of Teton Valley, some of the best Barley growing land in the world. They use spring water from the Grand Tetons, barley from the valley and local hops. Drinking beer in barley country is about as fresh as it gets!!!. This post does not really have much to do with the article, but if anyone ever gets a chance to go to the Tetons, be sure to drive through Teton Valley

 

My concern always is once prices raise they rarely fall later. Once the consumer gets used to spending more, why lower it? Unless the rise is significant and impacts the demand.

 

If this does become an issue, I would hope that brewers and business owners handle themselves in the same fashion they did during the hop shortages of several years ago. (ala Jim Koch style)

 

I'm not too concerned about beer prices rising due to a barley shortage as the cost of grain is only around 5% of the total cost of craft beer to the consumer. My bigger concern would be that if breweries decide to limit certain releases, it could mean price increases for those particular brews.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/12/craft-beer-expensive-cost_n_5670015.html

 

Yes. From what I recall, people were generally very generous and looking out for one another in the midst of that mess. I believe Jim Koch had a sort of hop lottery to try and fairly distribute surplus hops to brewers? I am sure I am forgetting the precise details of how he handled it.

 

Well, there's also the possibility of those breweries with long(er)-term contracts having to deal with lower quality malt resulting from the damaging weather.

 

Are there any other industries that are also competing with brewers for the limited barley available? And if so, do they have alternatives they might choose instead of barley?

As @hopfenunmaltz pointed out there are surpluses of barley from previous years' harvests, and crops will come soon from the southern hemisphere, where growers should have had time to plant to respond to the expected shortage. If the current barley crop is mainly being grown for brewers then I feel like they'll get through this will little disruption, but if there are other major players competing with brewers/maltsters for the available barley that might be a concern. Not that I have any specific knowledge or insight into these markets.... it's a gut feeling based on the hop shortage a few years ago where I didn't see any change in available beer or prices on the consumer end and it seemed like a lot of concern over nothing. Assuming the same players are involved in this malt shortage, then I would expect similar results on the consumer end.

 

I will be curious to see how this affects the breweries here in state.

 

I bet this is what played a part in the prices going up for the Northern Brewer all grain kits. It jumped a good $7-$10 more from what it used to be. What used to cost $20 for a simple pale is is now upwards to 30 or more.

 

Barley has some challenges as a crop. It no longer is a commodity, but is largely grown on contract from maltsters. Corn is now planted in areas where it did not do well, forcing out barley, and barley is not used much for animal feed as corn has taken over. Climate change has allowed barley to be planted in parts of Canada where it was not before. Barley intended for malting has to meet standards and gets rejected if there are problems, like this situation where the barley sprouted on the stalk and started to convert.

There is an article in the latest "New Brewer" magazine that covers the raw material situation, and projects future demand.

 

Well, "fresh barley" is a sort of misnomer and has little to do with brewing. Barley is harvested only after it is essentially "dried" on the stalk (if the moisture content is too high, it can undergo additional drying after harvest).

After harvest, and before reaching the brewery, the barley has to be shipped to a maltster where it will be malting - steeped, allowed to germinate and sprout, then dried and kilned. A few large brewers (Coors and AB) own their own malting operations and a few smaller brewers have done some limited malting (Rogue, for one), but most every other brewery buys their malt from malting companies.

 

For comparison, Rogue's capacity is 15 tons, MillerCoors 230,000 tons, and Busch Agricultural Resources 412,000 tons. There are bigger maltsters in North America, Cargill, GrainCorp, and MaltEurope.

 

Yeah, and I guess thrown in Rahr - the last US maltster that hasn't been gobbled up by one of the multinational giants.

One of the interesting and less discussed aspects of the craft boom and the 3000 breweries in the US, is that as the number of breweries have grown, the wholesale distributor segment of the industry has continue to consolidate --- as has the US malting industry.

A quick look at a late 1950s brewing industry publication and it lists around a dozen large malt house advertisers. And pre-Pro there were a couple hundred malt houses. It'll be interesting to see if any of the "micromaltsters" succeed on a equivalent level of a BBC or SN.

 

There are many "boutique" maltsters that have sprung up around the US making small batches of locally sourced malt. In Malt by John Mallet he lists 25 around North America with capacity of 1 ton to 825 tons per year.

 

Someone blames InBev in 5...4...3...2...