European barley changing the face of American beer

The face of American been has changed drastically over the past 20 years, and European barley has been credited with being the driving force behind it.

According to Bloomberg, small American breweries have been popping up all over the country, multiplying at a rate of 20% a year, who are making their way into a $22 billion industry.

And it is these breweries that are helping drive the record high exports of European barley across the Atlantic.

“We’ve been using European malt from day one in our brewery, and that was one of the things that we did think would differentiate us,” said Ron Barchet, co-founder of Victory Brewing Co. “The barley that they grow in Germany and in Europe in general is more suitable for all-malt beers, which most craft beers are.”

Craft breweries are credited with using more than three times as much malt than their big beer counterparts, and while craft volumes made up 7.8 percent of the U.S. beer market in the year of 2014, they accounted for around a quarter of all malt consumed.

Over the past five years, malt exports from Europe to the United States has more than tripled, according to data from Eurostat. Industrial scale breweries tend to use adjuncts, which also cuts costs for maltsters.

“Adjuncts basically bring sugar without bringing any flavor, so it means they can make a very, very light beer,” said Scott Casey, an analyst in Hamburg at RMI Analytics GmbH. “The American industry is really focused around large-scale beer, for a long time there hadn’t been investment in specialty malting.”

And because of this, over time, American drinkers have time and again turned toward European style drinks, and the longer this continues to happen demand for malt will continue to grow.