BROADCASTS.com

Some people nerd out about beer in general. Others go wild for water profiles, hop varieties, or yeast strains, but in Don Tse\u2019s experience, not enough people are paying attention to malted barley. It\u2019s something he\u2019s been passionate about for a decade, and a topic he finally gets to explore in-depth in his first piece for Good Beer Hunting.

In that Critical Drinking op-ed, titled \u201cFight the Power \u2014 How Craft Malt Is Central to Taking On Beer\u2019s Industrial Complex,\u201d Don explains how the barley of today shouldn\u2019t be the barley of yesterday. Typical crops are bred to resist disease and blight every few years. But in North America, barley that\u2019s now widely planted\xa0 has been around for three decades and is the main source of what\u2019s used for malt in beer recipes. Why? Well, it takes time, money, and a lot of buy-in to change a monoculture crop like barley. That change is finally coming, thanks to investments from researchers at Cornell University, breweries like Allagash, and other forward-thinking farmers ready to make malt craft again.\xa0

In our conversation, you\u2019ll hear Don talk about why it took so long for him to pursue this passion project, why as a Canadian he\u2019s focused on American farmers, why he\u2019s so stoked on things like protein levels and output, and what sort of potential and future he sees in the North American barley industry. He doesn\u2019t expect people to be as nuts about the subject as he is. But he hopes that we\u2019ll all start to care, at least a little, to keep moving craft beer and our shared agricultural future looking bright.

\xa0