Another productive barley growing season in the Skagit Valley is wrapping up after 3 weeks of starts and stops from mother nature. Short bursts of rain in the forecast pushed our growers to harvest and also delayed others to wait for the fields to dry out a bit more. Moisture levels are the key factor in harvest timing and each day we had growers showing up for moisture checks to determine which field was ready for harvest. Since this grain has to sit in a silo through the winter and last us until next year’s harvest, moisture has to be low enough that it will not germinate in the silo, but high enough that it won’t die either. A bit of threading the needle to get it right on.

Heat Dome Concerns

In June and July this year, the PNW was covered by a heat dome. Barley does not like extreme heat and typically does not do well in environments like that. With a high likelihood of heat stress, we were worried about what it would do to our yields.

Being located west of the Cascade Mountains is always a huge advantage for us, with cooler air rolling in from the Salish Sea every evening preventing drought stress. This year that air also prevented our barley from being heat stressed and made it so the heat did not adversely effect the Skagit Valley grain crop. Unlike most other grain growing regions in North America our yields were good. There were also no forest fire smoke impacts! All in all a very good malt barley crop for 2021!

New Varietals for 2022

This year was an exciting one for a couple of reasons - two new varieties of barley!

In conversations with a couple of our customers, growers, and our operations team, we decided to continue our pursuit of new flavors and potential by planting Opera and Laureate. Both are UK varieties that have taken off over the past 4-5 years and we’re proud to be able to offer them in 2022 to our customers. We’ll have a full flavor profile and spec breakdown once they are released!

Barley harvest is a busy time of year for our team, but once our silos are full we have to wait for grains to come out of their dormancy stage. We’re looking forward to seeing what next year’s malt ends up looking like, but if the raw barley looks as good as it does, we’re going to have an awesome year of malting!