From the Fertile Crescent to Scotland’s “water of life”

In the world of whisky, barley holds a hallowed spot.

It’s the only grain type that can be used for making single malt. Other grains, notably corn for bourbon and rye for rye, are the basis for spirits that also belong to the whisky family.

Barley, one of the world’s oldest cereal crops, and its connection to the “water of life” begins 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent.

Today’s domesticated barley varieties are thought to be derived from the wild and weedy Hordeum vulgare spontaneum of the Fertile Crescent, that croissant-shaped swath that hooks from the Persian Sea, curves around the Mediterranean, and dips down the Nile River.

With a more moderate, agriculturally productive climate in the past than today, the Fertile Crescent was home to the first agricultural communities of the Middle East and the earliest cities for which there are records.

Barley, an annual bunchgrass that typically reaches a height of two to four feet, seems to have played a starring role in human settlements from the get-go.

A popular theory among anthropologist is that our ancestral hunter-gathers started planting down roots in order to grow enough grain to make beer.

Garrett Oliver, writing in The Brewmaster’s Table: Discovering the pleasures of real beer with real food, tips his glass to the idea in making the case for beer as a food group over a beverage.

The notion that our first farmers may have been brewers at heart is based on archeological evidence that shows barley as among the first cereals farmed and suggests that it was even the preferred crop over wheat varietals that were also available.

Had bread been what growers had in mind, barley represented an odd choice.

Low in protein and high in starch content, barley made for tricky stuff when it came to baking. These very same qualities, however, lent themselves nicely for making beer, the starting point on the whisky trail.

This Porridge Is Just Right

In all likelihood, the first beer was a case of porridge gone awry.

Porridge is cooked from dampened, sprouted grain. It would have become sweet once heated, as enzymes inside the seeds activated and started converting starches into sugars.

These sugars would have then become available to yeasts naturally present in the air, and an unattended porridge bowl could start to ferment.

As with wine, beer is the result of fermentation, the act of yeasts eating sugars, converting to carbon dioxide and alcohol.

Unlike wine, which is made from grapes that have their sugar free-flowing within the juice of each berry and readily available for yeasts to feast, beer requires coaxing grains to release their sugar first.

This process is called malting. Its practice has become more exact and finessed with time, but malting more or less mimics the action from the ancient porridge bowl and is essentially a playful trick on Mother Nature.

Barley, like other grains, stores its sugar inside the seeds to reserve as an energy source for growing leaves. Malting gets at these sugars by soaking the seeds in warm water, prompting the seeds to think that it’s spring and time to sprout.

As the seeds start to germinate, they release enzymes that convert starches into sugar and break down protein walls within the seeds into something that yeasts can eat.

Just as the seeds start to sprout, they’re drained from the water and dried. In Scotland, the drying was historically done in kilns fired by peat logs.

The dried seeds are now officially called malted barley, or simply malt.

One of the advantages that barley has over other grain types is that it has an intact hull that helps protect the seed while it’s germinating.

Barley’s seed kernels are also firmer that other cereals, helping the kernels to withstand the high moisture content typical of malting with less damage. This means there is more malted barley of high enough quality to go on to the next phases of whisky-making: mill, mash, still and cask.  

While the science for why barley and malting acted nicely as a pair may not have been fully known to ancient civilizations, the importance of setting down a process that humans could recreate surely was.

The oldest known recipe is for beer. Scribed over 4,000 years ago, it’s a hymn to the goddess of beer, Ninkasi, worshipped by the Sumerians of Mesopotamia. Practicality and reverence all in one.  

Viking Barley

Some historical sleuthing is still being done, but there is a strong case for Bere barley as the base for Scotland’s first experimentations with uisge beatha, the Gaelic translation for the Latin aqua vitae meaning “water of life” and the root for today’s whisky.

Bere (pronounced “bear”) is thought to be the oldest crop in continual cultivation on the British Isles.

Its catchier moniker of Viking barley is drawn from the argument that the grain was brought to Britain by the Vikings in the ninth century, making it a Scotland staple for a thousand-plus years.

Other research is ongoing to determine if Bere predates the Vikings on Scotland and goes back some five or six thousand years to the beginning of agriculture on the isle.

Bere barley is distinctive for the configuration of its seedheads, which are braided in rows of two-by-three instead of the more common two-by-one threading.

Over time, growers have purposefully bred for the two-by-one configuration with an eye toward boosting yields.

Bere is also an early-ripening crop. The advantage here is the ability to beat the calendar with a harvest before weather gets too dicey. The flip side to this shorter growing period is lower grain yields.

Today, Bere is mostly relegated to the Northern Isles of Orkney, located off the northeast coastline, and Shetland, the far stepping-stone leading from Scotland to Scandinavia.

Bruichladdich, located on Islay and dedicated to production with 100 percent Scottish barley, worked with researchers in Orkney at the Agronomy Institute/UHI of Kirkwall in 2005 in an experiment to revitalize this ancient strain.

The first effort, Bruichladdich Bere Barley 2008: Islay Grown, was released by the distillery in 2017, from a crop grown by Dunlossit Estate on Islay.

Bere barley presents two challenges to distillers. In addition to its lower crop yields, by a margin of about 50 percent, Bere also produces lower alcohol levels.

Bruichladdich has persevered with Bere, relinquishing attempts to grow it on Islay and continuing to work with growers in Orkney to make the single vintage, un-peated single malt.

Bruichladdich’s experimentation with Bere fits into the distillery’s narrative to find the terroir, the expression of a place through flavor, in whisky with barley.

Generally speaking, the flavors chalked up to barley are chocolate notes and descriptors such as “cookie” or “biscuit,” depending on which side of the Pond we’re doing the tasting. These characteristics are sometimes bundled and packaged together as “malty.”

Deeside Distillery, founded in 2017 in Aberdeen after starting up as a brewery in 2012, is paying close attention to these malt components.

A chance encounter at Bowmore, Islay’s oldest distillery, led to meeting Deeside head distiller Liam Pennycook. With permission from Bowmore staff, he retrieved a sample bottle to pour a taste.

The sweeter hints of the malted beer came through and were supported by the marriage of bourbon and Sherry casks.

Casks, by some estimations, account for upwards of 70 percent of a whisky’s flavor profile.

Casks are the spice rack to the holy trinity of raw ingredients for single malt: water, yeasts, and barley.

Keeping the Stills Running

When it comes to making single malt, there is an incongruous truth: stills can run all year round, but a barley crop comes once year.

Most of the barley planted is spring barley, which is harvested in August or September. There are winter barley varieties, but they tend to be less hearty compared to other grains like winter wheat or rye.

Research at institutions like the University of Minnesota is exploring cultivation of winter varieties to help supplement demand for barley.

Worldwide, the primary use for barley is as animal feed. Barley gets top market value, however, from the malting industry, which includes both brewing and distilling.

According to Scotland’s Rural College, the UK as a whole requires 1.5 million tons of spring barley for the malting industry alone. Most of the distilling takes place in Scotland, while most of the brewing occurs in England.

In 2018, barley represented the main cereal group grown in Scotland. It accounted for 55 percent of the country’s total cereal area, and 28 percent of the UK’s total barley area, with 250,000 hectares.

About half of the crop went to the malting industry and half to animal feed.

Concerto stands as the leading variety, representing 80 percent of the malting intake in Scotland and up to one-third of the brewing intake in England.

Concerto is valued for its quality, but the search is on for other varietals like Laureate, which could offer higher yields by about 12 percent.

With back-to-back record-breaking years for Scotch exports reported in 2017 and 2018, demand for barley could also be said to be at all-time highs.

According to data from the Scotch Whisky Association, the number of Scotch bottles exported in 2018 grew by 3.6 percent to 1.28 billion and value increased by 7.8 percent to £4.7 billion.

Blends, like global bestseller Johnnie Walker, continue to top the sales charts. Blends are the work of combining whiskies from different distilleries.

The style developed in the late 1800s, when Scotch was experiencing its first overseas boom, riding on the coattails of an expanding British Empire. Blends offered a way of coming up with a more consistent product that could be effectively exported and advertised to emerging markets.

Single malt Scotch on a label can be translated as: whisky to come entirely from one distillery (single); made from 100 percent barley (malt); matured for a minimum three years in a warehouse located in Scotland (Scotch).

A rise in sales of single malt accounted for 27 percent of the total export market for Scotch in 2017.

Back in 2014, when the UK’s malting industry consumption of barley was a mere 1.3 million tons, the BBC reported on the increasing amounts of barley being imported from England, as well as Germany and Denmark, for making Scotch.

Malters quoted in the article cited distillers as predicting that the amount of barley needed to keep pace with demand would increase by 20 percent over the next five years. The estimation has ended up being rather spot-on.

The sheer order of magnitude of the barley harvest needed to keep Scotland’s stills running makes producers like Kilchoman the exception to the rule.

Located on Islay and known as a farming distillery, Kilchoman handles all aspects in-house, beginning with the sowing of the barley fields that surround the site.

A bigger brand like Macallan, which aims to produce 11 million liters in 2019, has 100 acres of homegrown barley while getting the rest from elsewhere in Scotland and from northern England.

Beyond these sorts of generalities around scale, distilleries are notoriously tight-lipped when it comes to specifics about production.

This may mean that we won’t be seeing a recipe-hymn for single malt like the one found for beer and Ninkasi floating on the internet any time soon.

We’ll just have to settle for exaltation in a glass.