Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
apple cup hops
Bill Myers adds hops to the Bitter Rivalry brew.
A local farmer with an obscure variety of barley has found a niche for it in brewing. Now, malt made from that barley is the base of an Apple Cup beer called Bitter Rivalry.
Bill Myers of Colfax attended the Oct. 27 brew day of Bitter Rivalry at Elysian Fields which is based in Seattle. He was able to witness as Ben Davidson, brewer overseeing the concoction, and his team mixed the Palouse Pint malt made from Myers’ grain with Washington apples and apple juice and hops from Yakima. Myers was able to add in some of the hops during the process.
“It’s been fascinating to watch this and learn about it,” Myers said.
This is the first time Davidson has done an Apple Cup brew. While raised in Eastern Washington, Davidson is an alumni of University of Washington. Some of the Elysian Fields sales guys who are WSU alums asked him to create an Apple Cup brew.
“I was looking to try to go as local as I could with the beer,” Davidson said and using grain grown just up the road from WSU fit in with that.
Myers met Davidson and others from Elysian Fields while attending a brewing in the Seattle area that was using Palouse Pint malt from his grain. It was being used that day for a whiskey, but the Elysian guys liked the taste of the Baronesse Barley malt Myers makes.
“Pretty soon I’m talking to the brewer there about collaboration,” Myers said.
Myers’ product fit well into the locally grown category.
“Not only is it all Washington grown, it’s all me grown,” he said.
Baronesse Barley has been waiting a long time to find its place to fit in. It was originally developed in Europe to be a malter. While it had great flavor, it did not have a superior enough malting for big brewers. It made its way to the Western U.S. in the 1980s where it was used for livestock feed into the 1990s before falling out of favor.
“I wanted to continue,” Myers recalled. So he held back 3,000 bushels for foundation seed. The rights to the seed were bought and sold and ended up with another Washington farmer who told Myers he did not plan to grow it, only keep it from competing with his grain. That left Myers as the last man standing raising this variety of barley. Unable to buy or sell the seed, he has continued to grow it and save some seed from each crop. He plants about 1,000 acres with Baronesse Barley annually.
Myers began selling his grain directly as Joseph’s Grainery nearly a decade ago.
From that and a relationship with LINC foods in Spokane came the birth of Palouse Pint which sells malt grains to brewers.
Myers noted that people are beginning to look at the relation between where the malt grain is grown and the flavor the same way they look at grapes used in wine; that different places and climates can alter the taste of the end product.
Therefore the taste of the Baronesse Barley grown on the Palouse is unique.
Selling as a malting barley, Myers gets about four times the market value for his grain, but it has to be cleaned, put in totes and shipped.
He also spends a lot of time traveling around and meeting distillers and brewers.
“It’s important for me to know what they want from me,” he said.
Bitter Rivalry is expected to be available at Elysian Fields brewery pubs beginning about a week before the Apple Cup. Most of the pubs have TVs and the game will be playing while the beer is served. It will continue to be on tap until it runs out. Davidson expects there to be about 16 or 17 kegs total made.
“I think it’s going to be pretty good,” said Davidson, who took a taste recently. He described it as an English style ale, but “hoppier”; an apple English pale ale.
The brewing is not the end for the barley, however. According to Chris Murakami, Elysian’s lead brewer, the spent grain and yeast goes to an Enumclaw farm to feed dairy cattle.
“It saves a lot on our waste water bill,” Murakami said.
The spent grain does not have a high nutritional value, but is good for the cattle dietarily. After going through all four stomachs and coming out the other end, the grain–now manure–is made into fertilizer called Scarecrow’s Pride. This fertilizer is used by area farmers, some of whom grow pumpkins for Elysian Field’s biggest pumpkin contest. Those giant pumpkins are then used to hold beer for the brewery’ pumpkin fest.
“It’s just kind of one of those mutually beneficial relationships,” Murakami said.
Brewer Ben Davidson stirs the pot of Bitter Rivalry as Bill Myers, center, observes.
Jana Mathia is a reporter at the Whitman County Gazette.
Reader Comments(0)