What does it mean for a beer to be local?

I got mad. Really mad. I was watching a video online when it was interrupted by a commercial for Budweiser. The name of the spot was “Do You Know Where Your Beer Is Brewed?” Soft guitar music played while clips of idyllic landscapes and sunrises peaking over breweries slid across the screen. Nothing out of the ordinary there.

The gentle voice of the narrator says, “With 12 breweries spread all across the United States, your next Budweiser is closer than you think.” Budweiser hangs its hat on the fact that it can produce the same beer at 12 facilities and it will always taste exactly the same no matter where you drink it. No small feat, to be sure.

But then the voice adds, “You might even say we’re America’s largest local brewer.”

My eyes narrowed and my brow furrowed. ‘What in the heck is this?” I exclaimed. “That is our word!”

It took me a while to calm down from Budweiser’s blatant attempt to co-opt the word “local.” I was hot under the collar and wondered how Budweiser could justify this position.

I hottly discussed it with brewer friends and guests at my bar and most agreed Budweiser was trying to subvert the “drink local” movement. But in the end, none of them feared that it would come to do any real harm, so the conversation fizzled.

Time passed, as it always does, but the ember started that day kept burning in the back of my mind. After much passive consideration, I started to question the exact meaning of the phrase “local beer.”

I thought of local beer as being brewed nearby by a locally-owned brewery. It seemed simple enough until I started to draw parallels with the local food movement.

For a meal to be considered local, most diners would require that some of the ingredients be raised or reared nearby by at a locally-owned farm. Surely not everything in the meal would need to be local (ever seen Vermont salt?), but perhaps the majority should.

I started to wonder: Are Vermont brewers using locally-grown ingredients in their beers?

Limited local

Some brewers such as Sean Lawson, of Lawson’s Finest Liquids (Warren), are using local maple syrup, hops and grains “seasonally and for special projects.” Joe Lemnah, of Burlington Beer Company (Williston) told me that he plans to use as much local fruit as he can, citing that he is limited by tank space at the moment. Lemnah mentioned he has plans for “special harvest ales” which will showcase local grains and hops “to help grow the young local businesses.”

Brian Eckert, of Four Quarters Brewing (Winooski), listed a whole slew of local ingredients he will use this year: hops from the University of Vermont’s hop farm, sour cherries from Shelburne Orchards (Shelburne), grapes from Honora Winery (West Halifax), berries from Quebec and even honey from his own bees. Shaun Hill, of Hill Farmstead Brewery (Greensboro), has also used local wildflower honey in beers and he routinely brews with spelt and raw wheat grown in the Northeast Kingdom, as well as foraged dandelions from his family’s property.

It seems small Vermont brewers are regularly sourcing local ingredients, but how about the larger local breweries? Dave Hartmann, brewmaster at Long Trail Brewing (Bridgewater Corners) responded via email saying that to date Long Trail “have only used small amount of locally sourced hops from North Hero Hopyard,” and that the company is “looking for opportunities to work with other local suppliers.”

Mike Gerhart, brewmaster at Otter Creek Brewing & Wolaver’s Organic Brewing (Middlebury), said it can be difficult to find large enough quantities of local ingredients for year-round beers.

“We would gladly use any and all local ingredients if we could readily get the volumes we were looking for by suppliers that could be up to the standards to make it through our supplier approval process,” Gerhart wrote in an email.

Gerhart added, “We have geared our Wolaver’s seasonals to highlight local ingredients as the volumes make more sense. The pumpkins (for Wolaver’s Pumpkin Ale) are grown at Golden Russet Farm … and the coffee in our “Alta Gracia” (a coffee porter) comes from the Vermont Coffee Company.”

I noticed locally grown malted barley was distinctly lacking from the list of ingredients being used by brewers. Gerhart and Lawson had used Vermont-grown barley that was malted in Massachusetts by Valley Malt, a small artisan malthouse, for a collaboration beer called “Double Dose,” but that’s about it for local barley usage. When I pushed the issue with the brewers, most echoed Gerhart’s lament that not enough local barley was consistently available. Others said that the quality wasn’t right for the beers that they wanted to brew.

Consistency and quality are definitely concerns for brewers who pride themselves on offering a high quality product. Craft brewers are like artists, creating the most perfect expression possible. To ensure this, they select the best ingredients available and want to work with suppliers that can guarantee consistency from order to order, and therefore from batch to batch of beer.

Grain research

In a state that is now world-renowned for it’s beer and it’s diversified farming, I wondered how this could be the case. I turned to Heather Darby at the University of Vermont for answers.

Darby is an agronomic and soils specialist for the UVM Extension and is currently working on “several malt projects including mostly variety trials and other agronomic work to improve malt grain quality in our region.” Darby says that besides barley, she is also focusing on improving the quality of other local grains such as wheat, rye, triticale (a hybrid of wheat and rye) as well as oats.

But it’s slow going so far. One reason for this is that it’s been hard for Darby’s team to find brewers and bakers that are willing to work with the new varieties of these grains that she’s studying.

“Working with brewers has been a bit difficult … some are really interested in local and others really just aren’t, I guess it is the same as any other food business in the area.” She went on to say, “those that are committed (bakers and brewers) are really committed and have partnered with us on projects to help improve quality and expand utilization.”

I reached out to Jack Lazor, of Butterworks Farm to learn more about grain farming in Vermont. Since Lazor has been a sturdy pillar of the Vermont organic farming community for more than 40 years, I knew that he would have valuable insight. Lazor told me that farming barley for malting is much more difficult than farming barley for animal feed.

“It’s hard to get uniform quality year to year,” he said. If it’s too wet and rainy at the end of the season, germination can begin before the farmer has a chance to harvest the grain, which makes for uneven malt.

Economics of beer

The added work means Lazor has to charge more for the grain in order to stay profitable. He typically gets 75 cents per pound for his organic wheat, which he has sold to Vermont breweries such as Hill Farmstead and Four Quarters Brewing. But he has only been offered 40 cents per pound by a malthouse in the region for his organic barley. He said via email that if he could get the same price for barley as for wheat, it would be worth it to grow malting barley.

“I don’t think the price of a glass of beer would have to increase that substantially to pay the farmer a price which would bring a profit,” Lazor wrote. “So, I think the microbrewers need to pay more for local artisan malt and make it known that they are supporting the farmers. If the customer knew the extra 50 cents went to farmers, I think they’d be OK with it.”

Lazor’s prices might seem high compared to conventional malted barley which are between 30-60 cents per pound to the brewer, but Lazor is farming at a much smaller size than most grain farmers and he’s farming organically.

“It’s the only way I know how,” he said when I asked him if all his grains were organically farmed.

Even if Butterworks Farm decided to start growing malting barley, there’s still a missing piece to the local food system that is necessary to bring that barley to the breweries: a malthouse. A malthouse is a facility that turns raw grain into the fermentable malts used for brewing. As I mentioned earlier, there is an established artisan malthouse in Massachusetts, but shipping the barley from Vermont and back adds substantial expense, making it cost-prohibitive for most brewers in the area.

Both Lazor and Darby said this may be changing soon. Two malting facilities are setting up shop in Vermont in the near future. Darby said Peterson Quality Malt was close to opening in Monkton. Slow Hand Malting in Hinesburg has also announced plans to open soon and say on their website that their mission is, “to create high quality, grain malts and roasts that support agricultural livelihoods in our region.”

As it is now, the problem seems like a classic horse and cart situation. Farmers won’t grow barley for malting if brewers aren’t buying it, and brewers can’t buy malt if the farmers aren’t growing it. Having two malthouses set up shop in Vermont could be the tipping point for making local malt a reality. They will contract barley from the farmers and then sell the finished product to brewers.

Once this last piece of the local food chain is in place, Vermont brewers will be able to seriously redefine what it means to brew local beer. And then I suppose Budweiser will have to come up with a new ad campaign.

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Jeff Baker is the bar manager at The Farmhouse Tap & Grill in Burlington. His column, Hops & Barley, appears every other week. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/@aPhilosophyOf