I try to support local businesses. It’s hard to do in our society, especially when huge mega-corporations keep getting bigger and pricing smaller businesses out of the market. I do this with beer by buying most of my beer from brewers within about 100 miles or so of where I live. The trouble is that almost all of their ingredients come from a long ways away.
When thinking of Maryland, “amber waves of grain” doesn’t generally come to mind. Maybe we can get some “amber ripples”.
Tom Flores, the head brewer at Brewer’s Alley, has been working with a local dairy farmer, Greg Clabaugh, to produce a barley malt for brewing, and the fruits of their labor have just come online. And this apparently the first time this has happened in a century.
“As a brewer, I’m really excited that we can develop flavor straight from the field, pick what variety we want, how it’s planted, harvested and how it’s germinated and turned into malt itself and how it’s dried,” Flores said. “That’s a lot of fun for the brewer. We like to have control over our raw materials.”
Clabaugh said beer produced from the farm is a perfect example of value-added agriculture — a process of increasing the economic value and consumer appeal of an agricultural commodity.
It’s called “Amber Fields” and the style is a best bitter and weighs in at 4.4% ABV. I can’t wait to try it.
Beer-a-Day #178
