Saving Biodiversity: The Return of Heirloom Malts

Landrace Barley: A Collaboration Between Humans and Nature

Especially since the advent of genome sequencing and the rise of genetic marker-guided hybridization, plant breeders have acquired ever more sophisticated tools that help them to manipulate these variables and to meet universal and by-now well-understood imperatives of the beer making process. At the same time, these tools can result in the crops in the fields becoming more and more alike. In the extreme, the consequence could be the dominance of just a few, genetically similar, near-perfect varieties, if not a monoculture with little biodiversity, as is already happening in the global production of corn and soybeans.

Nature, on the other hand, is not driven by human use optimization. Instead, its objective is the survival of the species in as many diverse environments as possible. Its tools are trial-and-error mutations and natural hybridizations. While some of these are evolutionary dead ends others are superbly adapted evolutionary successes, even triumphs. The result is a great biodiversity with a rich gene pool and endless permutations of characteristics and traits. Ever since the Neolithic Revolution some 12,000 years ago, farmers have collaborated with nature by selecting only the best individuals in the field for successive propagations, not just in beer making but in the cultivation of all economic plants. The result of this combined natural and human give-and-take is the emergence of stable landraces, often with just a single set of genes, their own, and no superfluous genes or genes left over from past hybridizations in their family trees. Their adaptive traits have allowed them to survive in different terroirs for eons; and when they are used by humans, their diversity imparts many different flavors and textures. In fact, heirloom varieties and their seeds have become part of humanity’s nutritional heritage.

Enter the Science of Genetics

This natural biodiversity, however, is now under threat, in part because of the rapidly accelerating rise of genetics that began with Gregor Mendel’s simple theorizing about “heritable elements” in 1865. Our modern ability to breed plants that outperform their natural antecedents has made the old terroir-adapted landraces obsolete, at least from a strictly economic perspective. Many of these traditional varieties have become extinct and their genes are lost forever simply because farmers no longer cultivate them. New, purpose-bred economic varieties are designed to generate higher agronomic yields and more profits on the farm, as well as improved throughputs and more predictable outcomes in the malting and brewing process. On the consumer level, they also tend to result in beers of consistent quality and longer shelf lives.

Biodiversity: Nature’s Insurance Program

As we are now learning, however, these advances come at a cost. What modern barley varieties and the industrial malts made from them may have gained in perfection and dependability, they have lost in character. The rich and deep maltiness of varieties popular until just a few decades ago is often not found in varieties bred for modern, large-scale agricultural production. In addition, planting human-purpose-optimized plants on the same soil year in and year out, instead of cultivating naturally plants, is unsustainable long term because it can upset the soil balance and deplete its nutrients. Such degraded soils then need ever more fertilizers to maintain high yields.

Also, the more economic plants approach a state of monoculture, pest and disease pathogens often use this opportunity to adapt to them. They become resistant even to the most noxious herbicides and pesticides, and ultimately overwhelm their host plants. As this “war” escalates, countermeasures become more aggressive, and soil infertility, agricultural runoff, and environmental pollution increase in equal measure. However, the loss of biodiversity and the shrinking gene pool can make recovery difficult because the traits required for a rescue have often disappeared together with the landraces that used to exhibit them.

Chevallier: Saving a Classic English Ale Malt

There is now a growing consensus that cultivating optimized “thoroughbred” plants seems economically attractive in the short run but is rarely so long-term. This is one of the key reasons why breeders, maltsters, and brewers are now “rediscovering” some of the landraces of the past — that is, if their seeds have been archived and maintained viable in special repositories. In barley, one such gene bank is the Germplasm Resource Unit at the John Innes Centre in Norfolk, UK, which has collaborated with the Crisp Malting Group of Great Ryburgh, UK, to revive a floor-malted version of Chevallier, a classic, English two-row barley,  that was accidentally discovered by a by a parson, the Reverend Dr. John Chevallier, in Suffolk, in 1820. [1]

In quick order, this barley became the very model of a successful landrace because, by the end of the 19th century, more than 80 percent of all British ales were made with it. Chevallier had become “probably the most widely distributed and best-known barley variety, producing heavy crops of extremely friable grain, with an almost transparent husk, a high percentage of starch and great weight.” [2] In its heyday, Chevallier was also cultivated throughout Continental Europe, in California, Chile, Australia, and New Zealand. By 1920, however, because of its tall stalks and poor lodging resistance, it had been almost entirely replaced by such shorter, higher-yielding hybrid varieties as Plumage Archer and Spratt Archer.

Haná, the Heirloom Mother of All Lager Malts

Another significant heirloom malt also revived by the Crisp Malting Group is Haná, which is arguably the world’s all-time most important two-row summer brewing barley landrace. [3] Its origin is the Haná Valley, a fertile agricultural plain in Moravia, now part of Czechia. Haná malt was the grist of the first golden lager, the Pilsner, released by the Měšťanský Pivovar (Burgher Brewery) of Plzeň (Pilsen) in Bohemia, in 1842. Haná’s superior agronomic, malting, and brewing properties have since migrated through hybridizations into many other varieties, both heirloom and contemporary, including the so-called Proskowetz Hanna Pedigree, bred in 1884 and planted until 1958, and the Opavský Kneifl, bred in 1926. As carriers of the old Haná genes, these two became the foundation for further generations of top-performing brewing barleys. By the middle of the twentieth century, cultivars with Haná genes included the Czech Valtice (or Valtický) and Diamant, developed between 1956 and 1965, as well as the East German Trumpf (also spelled Triumpf, Triumph, and Trumph), released in 1973. Today, Diamant and Trumpf alone appear in the pedigrees of some 150 barley varieties worldwide. The original nineteenth-century Haná, therefore, is internationally recognized as the most significant direct and indirect progenitor of modern top-quality brewing barleys.

Outlook

The re-releases of such heirloom cultivars as Chevallier and Haná from archived seeds allows modern brewers to recreate classic beer styles authentically with flavors resembling those of the 19th century; and because they are back, their genes and traits will continue to be available to breeders for years to come.

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