Types of Whiskey & Whisky: What Grains are Used to Make Whiskey? — Eight Oaks All whiskeys, no matter where they come from, start with the grain. But what grains are used for whiskey? And how do these grains change the way the whiskey tastes? We break down the different types of grains that are typically used to make whiskey, including what flavors come from the grains, and sometimes more importantly, what flavors come from the earth where those grains were grown.
- Historically some of the first whiskey (or whisky as it’s spelled in Scotland and Japan) were made entirely from barley.
- Most barley whiskeys are malted.
- The malting process is done to make the barley sprout and create enzymes, which convert the carbohydrates into simple sugars, which are then fermented by the yeast in alcohol.
Malted barley produces a smoky, toasted, or nutty flavor. Most whiskeys produced around the world include some malted barley. However, some distillers also used unmalted barley, which also adds sharp and sour flavors, including lemon or apple. American distillers introduced corn into whiskey making some time in the mid-1700s.
- Corn is the required foundation for bourbon To be considered bourbon, the United States regulations require at least 51% corn and it must be aged in new, Charred Oak barrels.
- In addition to bourbon, corn is also responsible for other corn whiskeys, which are typically unaged or aged in used barrels.
- Corn is often credited for providing bourbon with the sweet flavors, but no grain actually provides sugar content in whiskey because sugar doesn’t go through distillation.
Corn typically doesn’t provide strong flavors, which is why it’s often combined with other grains that do provide flavor. That sweet, caramel flavor in your bourbon actually comes from the wood sugars in the charred barrels used for aging the spirit. Americans started using rye in whiskey because it can grow just about anywhere, but Pennsylvania is where Rye Whiskey traces its roots.
What does barley do for moonshine?
Description. Malted Barley for Moonshine Whiskey Mash by North Georgia Still Company. Whiskeys made from barley produce sweet flavors with caramel and brown sugar hints. Often described as having a roasted, nutty, toffee, flavored cereal quality.
Does moonshine need barley?
This blog provides information for educational purposes only. Read our complete summary for more info. March 29, 2013 Last updated March 14, 2023 
The first step in making moonshine is to create a moonshine mash. This is an essential process that involves mixing moonshine ingredients to prepare for the fermentation process. The primary ingredients used in a moonshine mash are corn and barley. Though other ingredients are sometimes added to provide a distinctive flavor or to increase the proof.
A mash made with corn, barley, and rye is perhaps the most popular moonshine recipe of all time. However, did you know that there are actually a lot of different moonshine mash recipes? In this article we’re going to give you our all time favorite moonshine mash recipe plus six additional mash recipes that we love.
Each varies in difficulty, cost, and time required to make. However, they all have one thing in common – they produce high-quality moonshine. Though before you make a moonshine mash at home, it’s essential to keep in mind that making moonshine mash is generally legal, but distilling alcohol at home without a federal fuel alcohol or distilled spirit plant permit (for commercial distillers) is illegal.
- Therefore this article is for educational purposes only and we highly recommend that you read our legal summary for more information on the legalities of distillation before proceeding.
- Also, check this out if you’re looking for an educational article on the entire process for how to make moonshine,
It’s a comprehensive guide on making moonshine, from start to finish.
What flavor does malted barley add to whiskey?
Why Barley In Bourbon? – There are two types of barley used in bourbon: malted and unmalted. Malted barley is a process performed to help the barley produce enzymes. These enzymes create long-chain carbohydrates which eventually turn into alcohol. Malted barley can help bourbon taste nutty, smoky, and chocolaty.
Why add barley to mash?
How Are Enzymes Created? – During the malting process, barley is dried to a moisture content below 14% and then stored for for 5 to 6 weeks to overcome seed dormancy. The grain is then steeped in water to allow it to absorb moisture. This causes the barley to sprout.
- When the grain have a moisture content of around 46%, they are air dried over the course of a number of days.
- Once the malt has been air dried, it is kiln-dried to give the grain its color and flavor profile.
- Barley develops enzymes during malting that are needed to convert starches into sugar during the mash process.
A typical grain bill for a whiskey mash normally consists of malted barley with other added grains such as corn, rye or wheat. Hot water (hot liquor) is added with the grain which allows the enzymes in the malt to break down the starch in the grain into sugars.
- During the mash process, enzymes in the malted barley will convert starches into sugar.
- Without enzymes the starch would not be converted into sugar and the yeast would not have any sugar to ferment into alcohol.
- It is critically important to use CRUSHED malted barley and not regular or flaked barley.
Remember, distilling alcohol is illegal without a federal fuel alcohol or distilled spirit plant permit as well as relevant state and local permits. Our distillation equipment is designed for legal uses only and the information in this article is for educational purposes only. Emmet Leahy is the Chief Operating Officer and lead product developer at Clawhammer Supply, a small scale distillation and brewing equipment company. He loves the process of developing new equipment for making beer at home just as much as he does using it to brew his own beer.
What does barley do to alcohol?
Malting is an important component of the brewing process. Malted barley is the source of the sugars (principally maltose) which are fermented into beer by the yeast. In fact, malt is simply a general term used as an abbreviation for several things associated with maltose and malted barley.
Malting is the process in which barley grain (Figure 6) is soaked and drained to initiate the germination of the plant from the seed. When the seed germinates, it activates enzymes which start converting its starch and protein reserves into sugars and amino acids that the growing plant can use. The purpose of malting a grain is to release these enzymes for use by the brewer.
Once the seeds start to sprout, the grain is dried in a kiln (in a process known as kilning) to stop the enzymes until the brewer is ready to use the grain. 
Figure _unit3.1.6 Figure 6 Barley grains used in malting Show description|Hide description This is a photograph of barley grains close up. Figure 6 Barley grains used in malting The brewer needs to take into account both the water chemistry and the amount of enzymes in each type of malt to optimise their beer recipes.
- Specific enzymes activated in this process are primarily two types of enzyme known as amylases: α-amylase and β-amylase.
- These enzymes are present naturally in your saliva and break down starch ingested into simple sugars which can be digested by the body.
- For brewing purposes these two enzymes differ in function with respect to the sugars produced from the starch.
β-amylase produces fermentable sugars (such as maltose), which are later turned into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation. Conversely, α-amylase produces unfermentable sugars (such as maltodextrins), which stay in the brew, adding body and fullness and bringing a sweet, malty flavour to the beer.
β-amylase is activated at around 62–67 °C, and α-amylase around 71–72°C. By carefully controlling the temperature of the brew, the brewer can determine the ratio between the two types of sugar, and thus the final amount of alcohol and malty flavours left in the beer. As you have now seen, the whole brewing process is more complex than you might have first thought, with precise control needed over each of the four constituents of the final beer.
You are now going to see how all of this works in practice by exploring a brewery.
Why is barley used in distilling?
Why are single malts distilled from malted barley?|Whiskipedia Barley is a type of grain that is well-suited to the production of whisky, as it contains a high level of starch, which can be converted into sugar and then fermented into alcohol. Second, barley has a strong, distinctive flavor that is characteristic of many types of Scotch whisky. The preferred use of barley (malted barley) for whisky production in Scotland has historical reasons above all. Hardy barley was best grown in the Scottish climate, which is why it was the most widespread crop from the Lowlands to the Highlands to the Islands in the past.
In addition, barley offers the advantage that it can be germinated relatively easily and thus malted. Whisky distilled from malted barley has shaped the taste of Scotland’s national spirit for centuries. Today, the scotch whisky regulations stipulate that malt whisky may only be distilled from malted barley.
Scotch whisky, on the other hand, can also be distilled from numerous other grains such as oats, corn or wheat. These so-called grain whiskies are mainly used in blended whiskies but are sometimes sold as single grain. ##Why is barley malted? Malting the barley is one of the crucial steps in the production of malt whisky.
During malting, the barley is moistened to encourage germination. This triggers enzymes in the barley, which converts the starch contained in the grain into malt sugar. This is now available for the yeast cultures during fermentation. At a few distilleries, at least some of the malting is still carried out traditionally on their own,
However, the majority of manufacturers have switched to purchasing the malted barley from specialized,
Can you make mash without barley?
Can raw grains produce fermentable sugar without use of malted barley or another malted grain? Yes they can. While malt greatly facilitates the process, unmalted barley, or rye, can produce a fermentable mash. 
See the discussion by Edward Skeates White, a nineteenth century authority on malts and malting, here, pp,46-47 ( The Maltster’s Guide, 1860). Numerous books are in agreement, see e.g., Brewing With Raw Grain: A Practical Guide (1883) by Thomas Lovibond, a well-known brewing scientist of the same era.
In his table at p.73 he states he made a mash from 100% raw barley (“barley 100”). He gives the respective yields of this barley 100 as against various mashes that combine malted and unmalted grain. It is no surprise that the 100% unmalted version gives the lowest yield, but a wort is still produced and hence alcohol can be made.
Raw grains such as barley have an enzyme, b-amylaze, in small amounts but enough to convert polymer starches to maltose. See also the extracts below (pp 133-134) from Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlander s, an early (1913) ethnographic study of the mountain Appalachians, addressing the mash for a mountain whiskey.
He states if malt was available it was used with raw grains. If it wasn’t, due say to the “blockade” (British embargo during the Revolutionary War), a whiskey mash could still be made. Perhaps, in this last case, the mountaineers were really making a corn malt as a sprouting, drying, and grinding of moistened corn are mentioned.
Corn is probably different to raw barley in regard to the potential for self-germination. Raw corn must be heated to a high temperature, for example (cooked), to hydrolize the starches. Nonetheless the account is of interest as showing an artisan practice: no very sophisticated knowledge or equipment were needed to mash without sourced barley malt.
It may be noted, too, that he explains fermentation can be achieved without adding yeast. Last year I devoted numerous posts to this aspect of “wild” fermentation. White explains why this generally isn’t done in brewing: rawness of taste and instability (likelihood to sour or putrefy) of the wort. Stewart & Thomson make a similar point (see pp 15-16) i n their 1849 text on brewing and distilling.
Lovibond claims in his book to offer methods that reduce the disadvantages of raw grain, but he clearly opts for a mixture (malted and unmalted) grain. Indeed, this is the basis of mass market brewing today for adjunct lager. 
How do you increase malt flavor?
What if you want a maltier tasting beer? A bigger, more robust malt flavor is usually achieved by adding more malt / malt extract to the recipe. A 1.050 OG beer is usually maltier than a 1.035 OG beer. If you do this, be sure to increase the bittering hops a bit to keep it balanced.
What flavor does oats add to whiskey?
Oats! They’re not just for breakfast anymore. Distilling with oats “creates a very creamy whiskey,” says Sonat Birnecker Hart, president and co-founder of Koval Distillery in Chicago. “It covers your palate. It’s a little bit earthyand has a nice sweetness to it as well.” Using 100% oats, Koval crafts a whiskey that Hart describes as clean, bright, and “incredibly grain-forward.”Major American distillers including Jim Beam and Buffalo Trace have previously experimented with oats, but only on a small scale.
Perhaps the reason we haven’t seen oats widely used in whiskey is the list of unique challenges they present, from milling the thin, pliant grain, all the way through distillation. In creating Woodford Reserve’s Master’s Collection Oat Grain bourbon, which includes 18% oats, master distiller Chris Morris was met with foaming fermentation that required filling fermenters to a lower than normal level.
The oats also created a sticky mash, which made it difficult to monitor and regulate temperature. “But we were prepared for this,” Morris says. ” Exotic grains like oats are going to be sticky, are going to foam.” And in the end, the challenges were made worthwhile by the resulting whiskey.
“It’s distinctly oatmeal, raisins, dates, cinnamon, brown sugar,” Morris says. “It reminded me of an oatmeal cookie.”Portland, Oregon-based Stone Barn Brandyworks has experimented with a variety of single-grain expressions, including oat, which “produces a whiskey that’s really soft and relatively light and fruity in flavor,” one that could appeal to a potentially broader demographic than a robust bourbon or rye, says head distiller Andy Garrison.
“Everyone eats oatmeal at some point, so people know the smell and the flavor of oats.” However, Garrison finds oats also perform well in concert with other grains, noting how oats “gave us the sweetness and fatness of mouthfeel that we liked about, but mixing in a portion of rye or malted barley added a little bit more complexity, spiciness, more intensity than the pretty, sweet, light oat character.”While oats seem to be enjoying a moment with craft distillers, the grain has a history.
Guided by a 19th-century Irish whiskey recipe, Ransom Spirits’ The Emerald 1865—made from around 15% oats, along with malt, unmalted barley, and malted rye, and distilled in their direct-fired alembic pot still—seeks to recreate the traditional Irish style. “When it comes off the condenser as white dog, oats are really aromatically apparent,” founder Tad Seestedt says.
In addition to troublesome stickiness in the mash tun, oats may have fallen out of favor in part because they yield less fermentable sugars than other grains, as Seestedt and other distillers have noted. But for those prepared to tackle these challenges, oats can lend a generous palate weight and viscosity. 
Corsair distills Oatrage from a mashbill of coffee malt, malted barley, and malted oats, resulting in flavors of burnt coffee beans and smoked meat; High West’s minimally aged Silver Western Oat offers a taste of oat whiskey in its purest form; and Koval goes all-oat with Single Barrel Oat, distilled from a 100% oat mashbill.
- To experience oat whiskey in its purest form, reach for High West’s minimally aged Silver Western Oat, distilled from 85% oats and 15% malted barley.
- High West master distiller Brendan Coyle notes “a subtle, almost vanilla-like flavor,” and the use of hulled oat kernels, or groats, improves both yield and taste.
“You get very little extract, flavor, and aroma from the hull, so when you use 100% oat groats in that mash, you’re really retaining all the great flavor, aroma, and extract properties of the oat,” Coyle explains. High West also produces a whiskey called Valley Tan using wheat and oats in the manner of Mormon pioneers.For whiskey lovers seeking something different, oats offer a new dimension, whether distilled alone or together with their more familiar corn, rye, and barley counterparts.
What should homemade moonshine taste like?
What’s the Taste Like? – The bottles of moonshine somehow taste like 151 rum. If you’ve tasted this drink, you’ll get a burning sensation and a kick, which is similar to the taste of moonshine. Also, some explain that bottles of moonshine taste kind of earthy.
Aside from the rubbing alcohol taste, you should taste the slight sweetness and hints of corn flavor. Some testers report that bottles of moonshine taste like good grappa and have a flavor strictly of their own. Others claim to discern vanilla notes in the good moonshine. However, this is not a true moonshine flavor and was most likely added to make it more appealing to the modern palate.
Also Read: Moonshine vs Whiskey
What does barley do to alcohol?
Malting is an important component of the brewing process. Malted barley is the source of the sugars (principally maltose) which are fermented into beer by the yeast. In fact, malt is simply a general term used as an abbreviation for several things associated with maltose and malted barley.
- Malting is the process in which barley grain (Figure 6) is soaked and drained to initiate the germination of the plant from the seed.
- When the seed germinates, it activates enzymes which start converting its starch and protein reserves into sugars and amino acids that the growing plant can use.
- The purpose of malting a grain is to release these enzymes for use by the brewer.
Once the seeds start to sprout, the grain is dried in a kiln (in a process known as kilning) to stop the enzymes until the brewer is ready to use the grain. Figure _unit3.1.6 Figure 6 Barley grains used in malting Show description|Hide description This is a photograph of barley grains close up. Figure 6 Barley grains used in malting The brewer needs to take into account both the water chemistry and the amount of enzymes in each type of malt to optimise their beer recipes.
- Specific enzymes activated in this process are primarily two types of enzyme known as amylases: α-amylase and β-amylase.
- These enzymes are present naturally in your saliva and break down starch ingested into simple sugars which can be digested by the body.
- For brewing purposes these two enzymes differ in function with respect to the sugars produced from the starch.
β-amylase produces fermentable sugars (such as maltose), which are later turned into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation. Conversely, α-amylase produces unfermentable sugars (such as maltodextrins), which stay in the brew, adding body and fullness and bringing a sweet, malty flavour to the beer.
Β-amylase is activated at around 62–67 °C, and α-amylase around 71–72°C. By carefully controlling the temperature of the brew, the brewer can determine the ratio between the two types of sugar, and thus the final amount of alcohol and malty flavours left in the beer. As you have now seen, the whole brewing process is more complex than you might have first thought, with precise control needed over each of the four constituents of the final beer.
You are now going to see how all of this works in practice by exploring a brewery.
Why is barley used for alcohol?
Why Brewers Choose Barley Beer has been made quite possibly for as long as people have cultivated cereals—that is, for a very long time. Archaeological evidence of grain processing might indicate that beer or beer-like beverages originated not long after humans figured out that grinding or pounding plant material yielded better tasting, sweeter food—a practice that goes back tens of thousands of years.
Barley kernels are uniquely suited for brewing because their structure and enzyme levels can quickly and easily break down starches into fermentable sugars. Specific strains of cultivated barley have tended to stay in narrow geographic regions for thousands of years, and there is very little genetic change over time. Genomic prediction allows breeders to quickly and easily implement specific adaptations to barley landraces (local cultivars), accelerating the evolution of the barley plant.
This beverage might have originated in an even earlier era, before stone tools, because the chewing of grain (as is still done in making Andean chicha) adds salivary enzymes that convert starches into sugar, ready for fermentation. On this basis, beer could conceivably have been made in some form right back to the point at which our species began behaving in the modern manner, around 100,000 years ago.
Many grains, including rice, millet, corn, and sorghum, are used to make beers in different areas of the world, but the key grain used in brewing western-style beers is barley. This prevalence is not just a matter of historical coincidence: Barley has what you might call an enzymatic toolbox that makes it the perfect brewing ingredient.
Like most grasses, barley has a fairly simple anatomy. For brewers, the spike at the top is the important part of the barley plant, because it is where the seeds sit. The structure of the spike varies significantly among different strains of barley, and those different structures are keenly relevant to brewing beer.
Spikes can vary in the number of rows of seeds they bear, in multiples of two: two, four, and six. And although more might intuitively seem better, six is not necessarily the preferred row number. Indeed, European brewers overwhelmingly prefer two-row barley. The barley seed is layered, a property that is important for understanding why it is the preferred cereal for making beer.
And it is the tiny sliver of seed tissue called the aleurone layer that is critical in brewing. During the normal life cycle of a barley plant, the endosperm of the seed develops a large reserve of starch, destined to power later development when the seed starts to germinate.
In its original form this starch is not directly available to the seed for growth, but the aleurone layer contains a reserve of enzymes that are released when germination starts. Those enzymes promptly begin to break down the endosperm boundary, exposing the starch granules inside to other aleurone enzymes that break them down into sugars, primarily maltose.
Although other grains have an aleurone layer in their seeds, none has quite the capacity that barley does to break open the endosperm and turn starch into sugar. Accordingly, a brewer making beer primarily with rice or wheat will usually also add some barley.
The process of getting the sugars out of the barley seed by starting germination is known as malting, Maltsters soak and aerate the seeds to stimulate sprouting, then dry them to stop the sprouting process before the resulting sugars are consumed. The dormant sugars can then be exposed to the tender mercies of the yeast whenever required, allowing the maltsters to hijack nature’s system by keeping the barley seeds from germinating until they want to make their malt.
At that point, germination is artificially induced. The seed arrangements of six-row, four-row, and two-row barley varieties vary according to the degree to which the spike is twisted. This twisting governs the number of kernels per row. Two-row barley is completely untwisted, so that all the kernels are symmetrical and straight, one row per side.
Six-row has a two-thirds twist to it, and four-row has a half twist. Most beer outside the United States is brewed from two-row barley, whereas New World brewers incline toward the six-row forms. A question of taste may be involved here, because there are flavor differences between the two kinds. Barley can be cultivated in both the spring and the winter, a major difference being that winter barleys require a process called vernalization (basically, cold exposure) to stimulate flowering during the late fall.
If vernalization does not occur, winter plants will fail to produce a seed head. Most cultivated barley strains (known as landraces ) fare better as spring crops than as winter crops, and right up until the 1960s most malting in Europe was done with two-row spring barley.
There are literally thousands of barley cultivars. Barley growers have kept good breeding records over the past century or two, so that the pedigrees of many of these cultivars are well known. Not all varieties are used in brewing, and many are used exclusively in livestock feed production. But modern maltsters and brewers make use of many of them, and each year in the United States, the American Malting Barley Association (AMBA) informs maltsters which strains are going to be the best for that year.
In Europe, Euromalt serves as the clearinghouse for information about barley strains and malting, and in Australia, Malt Australia performs the same service. The recommendations of these associations differ from country to country. For instance, in 2017 Malt Australia accredited 27 landraces, of which Bass, Baudin, Commander, Flinders, La Trobe, and Westminster were listed as the major players.
- Like Europe, Australia focuses mostly on two-row barley strains for malting and brewing.
- In the United States, AMBA listed 28 accredited landraces for 2017, including both two-row and six-row forms.
- Among six-row barleys, Tradition and Lacey appeared to be the most sought-after for 2017, whereas the two-row landraces most in demand were ABI Voyager, AC Metcalfe, Hockett, and Moravian 69.
Rice, barley, corn, and wheat are all very similar in their basic anatomical structures. After all, they are all grasses, and quite closely related. Grasses are monocots, members of one of two major branches in the plant tree of life. During plant development, a region of the plant embryo called the cotyledon develops into the very first leaves of the plant.
Monocots are the flowering plants that have only one such cotyledon region (members of the other great flowering plant lineage, dicots, have two). The monocots are very diverse, and together with grasses, they include lilies, palms, tulips, onions, agave, bananas, and several other major groups. Along with grasses, lemongrasses, sedges, and bromeliads, cereals like barley, rice, wheat, and oats belong to the division of the monocots called Poales.
Poales can be further divided into more than 40 groups that include maize, barley, rice, and lawn grass. These grasses are all members of the family Poaceae, and, within this family, barley is in the genus Hordeum, Depending on which expert you believe, the barley genus contains anywhere from 10 to more than 30 species. 
The illustrations above, from left to right, zoom in on the barley plant, starting with the entire stalk, then a single spike, a detail of a kernel, and finally a cross-section of a barley seed with the all-important aleurone layer, which contains the enzymes that convert starches into fermentable sugars.
The last image on the far right shows the various configurations of barley kernels, with first a six-row, then a four-row, and finally a two-row barley plant. The six- and four-row plants are twisted to create a round spike, whereas the two-row plant has symmetrical kernels that are laid flat. The photograph shows a two-row plant and a six-row plant side by side.
Image courtesy of Patricia J. Wynne In 2015, Jonathan Brassac and Fred Blattner of the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research in Germany used genome-level DNA sequence data to look at how the 30-odd species of barley are related to one another.
- It was clear that H.
- Vulgare and two other species, H.
- Bulbosum and H.
- Murinum, form a group quite distinct from the other 30 or so species in the genus Hordeum,
- This analysis confirmed the traditional morphological grouping of these species together in their own subgenus.
- But doubt continues to hover over one entity that is classified as its own species by some taxonomists, and as a mere subspecies by others.
This is (to call it by its subspecies name) H. vulgare spontaneum, a form considered to be the wild counterpart of all the cultivated landraces of H.v. vulgare, There is still no agreement on whether this wild barley—the closest thing we know to the common ancestor of the landraces—is its own independent species, or whether all the domesticated forms remain conspecific with it.
- Because the landraces of Hordeum vulgare have gone through what plant breeders call domestication syndrome, we should expect that some of the traits in the domesticated strains will differ from their counterparts in the wild strains.
- And it turns out that in the landraces of barley the spikes are much less brittle than in the wild forms.
The brittleness of wild barley spikes enhances the dissemination of the seeds under natural conditions, but for human barley growers the calculation is very different. You don’t want the seeds to fall off when you harvest your barley, and ancient barley breeders seem to have indulged in a rudimentary form of genetic engineering by selecting plants that had a particularly strong spike structure holding the kernels together during harvesting.
The obvious question to ask now is, “Where did the barley landraces come from?” But before you can figure that out, you need to know whether barley was domesticated only once, or independently on several occasions, from multiple wild strains. Several studies have looked at the population structure of wild barley and the cultivated landraces with a view to answering this question.
Barley geneticists have tried to standardize their efforts by setting up what is called the Wild Barley Diversity Collection. This collection is made up of 318 wild barley strains (called accessions ), selected both to represent the broadest possible array of non-landrace strains, and to represent as much as possible of the ecological diversity within which barley flourishes.
Most accessions are from the Fertile Crescent, the area of the Near East where most scientists think barley was first domesticated, but some are from Central Asia, North Africa, and the Caucasus region between the Black and Caspian seas. The landrace counterpart collection of barley used for comparison is from a center called the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, which contains 304 worldwide accessions.
Some studies use this collection exclusively, but others also include a broader sampling of cultivated strains in order to cover as much geographic and genetic diversity as possible. To make analysis of the genomes of these many strains easier, researchers exploited certain reproductive characteristics of the barley plant.
- Individuals of barley and other grains can mate with themselves, and indeed have found that this is the best way to reproduce.
- They breed with other individuals occasionally, but their preferred mode of reproduction is with themselves.
- This selfing mode of reproduction means that they behave a little—but not exactly—like clones of themselves.
It also makes it easier to trace their genetics and to reconstruct their origins than it would be with a sexually reproducing species such as ours—for as we all know, sex complicates everything. To make the barley study as easy as possible, the accessions used were forced to reproduce with themselves for three generations before being harvested and processed.
- Several groups of researchers examined the genetic dispositions of varieties within the species Hordeum vulgare,
- Joanne Russell of the James Hutton Institute in Scotland, Martin Mascher of the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research, and their colleagues looked at the barley landraces using a technique called whole exome sequencing,
This technique obtains genome sequences from regions of the genome that code for proteins. Their analysis, published in 2016, showed that all of the landraces are more similar to one another than they are to the wild strains ( H.v. spontaneum ). Ana Poets, Zhou Fang, and Peter Morrell at the University of Minnesota and Michael Clegg of the University of California, Irvine, examined a larger collection of barley landraces (803 of them) to see if there is any clustering within the landraces.
And they found a lot of it, with six major clusters. More surprisingly, in two-dimensional space those clusters can be overlain on a map of where the landraces are found. These studies are interesting because they indicate that landraces tend to stick to certain geographic regions. As Poets and her colleagues observe, “Despite extensive human movement and admixture of barley landraces since domestication, individual landrace genomes indicate a pattern of shared ancestry with geographically proximate wild barley populations.” Such research can also help us estimate the number of clusters, or populations, of barley landraces and wild strains.
Russell, Mascher, and colleagues delved deeper into their Fertile Crescent findings and analyzed a data set including 91 wild and 176 landraces. The scientists narrowed the geographic range of their analysis because they were primarily interested in the genetics of five special accessions.
- They separated the landrace individuals from the wild accessions, and each of the wild accessions was then assigned to one of five ancestral populations.
- The wild strains fall into two recognizable clusters, suggesting that they come from two well-defined ancestral populations.
- The geographic break between the two clusters appears to be between a group of accessions mostly from Israel, Cyprus, Lebanon, and Syria, and those from Turkey and Iran.
Once they had obtained the detailed picture of wild strains, the researchers analyzed the landraces. They found that there are at least three ancestral patterns for landrace barley from this region. The five special accessions mentioned earlier are included in this analysis; and they are as special as accessions get, because they consist of 6,000-year-old barley kernels, found in Israel, that are believed to represent cultivars that humans used all that time ago.
And they appear to be very similar to modern landraces. More specifically, these cultivars show close affinity to current landraces from Israel and Egypt. This result is spot on with the idea that the domestication of barley was initiated in the Upper Jordan Valley. Close examination of the ancestral components of these five samples suggests that the Israeli landraces grown today have not changed much in 6,000 years, despite some occasional mating with wild strains.
Genome-level information is instructive not only about the ancestry of barley, but also about the genes that might have been involved in its domestication. We have already discussed the major outward difference that distinguishes wild accessions from landraces—the brittle spike.
But other traits were certainly also selected for by barley breeders over the past 10,000 years. Indeed, Russell, Mascher, and colleagues used their data set to identify the kinds of genes that have been, and continue to be, under selection in landraces. Among the traits they showed to be under breeding selection over the past several millennia are days to flowering, and height as response to temperature and dryness.
Both traits are important in the adaptation of cultivated barleys to their domestic circumstances. But as the scientists point out, there are doubtless many factors still to be uncovered. More genomics work will help us discover what they are. What about the brittle spike trait that we have seen was perhaps the most important genetic change during domestication? It turns out that the trait is under quite simple genetic control.
Two genes are involved, Btr1 and Btr2, whose protein products interact with each other. When these two gene products interact properly, the central stem, or rachis, is brittle; but if there is an abnormal interaction as the result of gene mutation, the rachis stays strong, and no shattering occurs. Other domestic grains, such as rice and wheat, also have strong rachises, raising the question of whether breeders of rice, wheat, and barley selected for this trait in these grains via the same genetic pathways.
Mohammad Pourkheirandish and Takao Komatsuda of the National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences in Japan settled this question by showing that the brittle rachis trait in barley is in fact unique: The rice and wheat systems do not involve the Btr1 / Btr2 interaction.
- Clearly, there is more than one way to achieve the same rachis qualities.
- This theme is a common one in evolutionary biology, so it is hardly surprising that plant breeders have also stumbled onto the same principle using artificial selection.
- In the first sentence of his 2015 review of barley biology, Robin G.
Allaby, of the University of Warwick in England, summed up the understanding of the domestication history of barley in eight words: “Barley did not come from any one place.” This shrewd observation is important, because most researchers have long assumed that domestication is necessarily a singular event.
Allaby clarifies our interpretation of the genomic data by pointing out that every single landrace of barley so far examined has genomic remnants of the four or five ancestral wild accessions, and he raises a key question—is barley the exception among domesticated forms, or is it the rule? The answer is that barley might well illustrate the rule.
Domestication—which in the case of barley seems to have taken place over the general region of the Fertile Crescent—was evidently not a simple process. In the past, the breeding of landraces of barley possessing the most desirable traits for agriculture was a trial-and-error affair.
- Six thousand years ago, barley farmers knew nothing of formal genetics, but they were smart and clearly knew enough about their plants to achieve the results they wanted.
- Breeders continue to grapple with the same two major kinds of traits: yield and quality.
- Yield traits include features such as numbers of seeds set, capacity to breed multiple times a year, or the brittle spike character that, if mutated, allows for more efficient harvesting.
Quality traits are those that effect the protein content, oil content, or any other phenotype concerned with the nutritive content of the plant. During the 20th century, barley breeders were still using their knowledge of classical genetics to facilitate breeding in a tedious and labor-intensive process.
- With the rise of genomic technology, and the ease with which it can be applied to large numbers of lines and landraces, a very different approach to barley and other grain breeding has now become possible, using cheaper and faster techniques.
- Genome-based plant breeding uses a concept called genomic prediction that relies on the predictive abilities of traits.
It requires genome-level sequencing of large numbers of landraces, as well as abundant data on the traits that might be targeted (such as seed size, protein content, and protein yield). Prior to the use of this approach, barley breeding experiments were massive and costly.
- Now, using genomic prediction, barley breeders can get a more precise, quicker, and cheaper idea of how easy it will be to breed for certain traits.
- Several such studies have already been directed at the assessment of quality traits that are important in brewing.
- Malthe Schmidt of the German plant-breeding company KWS SAAT and his colleagues analyzed the predictive abilities of 12 malting characteristics of spring and winter barleys.
By ranking those 12 desirable malting traits, they showed that winter barley would be easier to work with. Another study demonstrated the feasibility of the genomic remnants in improving seed quality traits. Nanna Hellum Nielsen of the Danish company Nordic Seed and her colleagues examined features such as seed weight, protein content, protein yield, and ergosterol levels (generally thought to be an indicator of resistance to fungi and bacteria), showing how genomics could predict the efficacy of breeding programs for these traits too.
So, although it is still early days, genomic approaches have already demonstrated their ability to facilitate improvement in the efficiency, yield, and quality of barley cultivation. Still, it is quite likely that the future of barley will lie in an even more cutting-edge technique: direct gene editing using the CRISPR technology and the newly developed prime editing approach.
However the story plays out, one thing is certain: Molecular biology holds huge promise for improving the raw materials of maltsters and brewers. This article is excerpted and adapted from A Natural History of Beer, © Rob DeSalle and Ian Tattersall. Reprinted with permission from Yale University Press.
Why is barley used in distilling?
Why are single malts distilled from malted barley?|Whiskipedia Barley is a type of grain that is well-suited to the production of whisky, as it contains a high level of starch, which can be converted into sugar and then fermented into alcohol. Second, barley has a strong, distinctive flavor that is characteristic of many types of Scotch whisky. The preferred use of barley (malted barley) for whisky production in Scotland has historical reasons above all. Hardy barley was best grown in the Scottish climate, which is why it was the most widespread crop from the Lowlands to the Highlands to the Islands in the past.
- In addition, barley offers the advantage that it can be germinated relatively easily and thus malted.
- Whisky distilled from malted barley has shaped the taste of Scotland’s national spirit for centuries.
- Today, the scotch whisky regulations stipulate that malt whisky may only be distilled from malted barley.
Scotch whisky, on the other hand, can also be distilled from numerous other grains such as oats, corn or wheat. These so-called grain whiskies are mainly used in blended whiskies but are sometimes sold as single grain. ##Why is barley malted? Malting the barley is one of the crucial steps in the production of malt whisky.
- During malting, the barley is moistened to encourage germination.
- This triggers enzymes in the barley, which converts the starch contained in the grain into malt sugar.
- This is now available for the yeast cultures during fermentation.
- At a few distilleries, at least some of the malting is still carried out traditionally on their own,
However, the majority of manufacturers have switched to purchasing the malted barley from specialized,
What does malted barley do for a mash?
Meet the Malts – The malted barley grain bill for the Evergreen Collection consists of a local Washington pale malt and three flavorful Pacific Northwest specialty malts. Each malt has a specific role to play in flavor development: 88% Pale malt Washington State Select® 2-Row Malt Provides a great base flavor and is the source of most of the sugars and enzymes to create alcohol.8% Crystal 60L Creates a red/amber hue and a pronounced malty, toffee, caramel flavor plus a clean, smooth finish 2% Pale chocolate from Thomas Fawcett & Sons Adds a dark brown color and a dark chocolate/coffee “campfire” flavor.2% Munich from Great Western Gives it a robust, rich, malt flavor
