Where to Listen:
What if there was a grain that didn’t have to be replanted every spring, that has roots growing 10-feet deep, taking in carbon and holding it deep in the soil, that helps prevent soil erosion and excess fertilizer from washing into our lakes–AND it makes a tasty beer.
In this episode, a look at the work behind an experimental batch of Kernza® beer at Karben4 Brewing in Madison that has the farming research world taking notice.
Host:
Amy Barrilleaux
Guest:
Joe Walts, Karben4 Brewing
Resources for You:
Taste the Change: Wisconsin Kenrnza®
Natural Climate Solutions: A path forward for Wisconsin’s agricultural sector
Three cheers for climate beer!
Kernza® Crunch: The race to develop the world’s first perennial grain crop
Transcript:
Amy Hello, I’m Amy Barrilleaux, and welcome to The Defender, Wisconsin’s environmental podcast. The Defender is powered by Clean Wisconsin, your environmental voice since 1970. What if I told you there was a grain that doesn’t have to be replanted every spring, that has roots growing 10 feet deep, taking in carbon from the atmosphere and holding it deep in the soil, that helps prevent soil erosion and excess fertilizer from washing into our lakes, and it makes a pretty tasty beer. It’s not magic, it’s Kernza, a perennial grain developed by the Land Institute in Kansas that could hold the key to making our farming systems more sustainable and even help fight climate change.
Nicole Tautges Kernza is doing photosynthesis, it’s fixing carbon out of the atmosphere, it’s turning it into a root biomass, and then that’s staying in the soil, which is what we want to happen.
Amy In this episode, a look at the work behind an experimental batch of beer at Karben4 Brewing in Madison that has the farming research world taking notice, that’s right now on The Defender. There’s no doubt, Kernza perennial grain holds a lot of promise for our farming systems. But for years, the question has been, how do we get farmers in Wisconsin to grow it and food producers to use it? A few years ago, I met Nicole Tautges with the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute at her small research plot full of golden kernza to talk about the future of this revolutionary perennial grain in Wisconsin.
Nicole Tautges I think we’re all impatient in Kernza. We’re all impatient for it to be adopted on larger scales in the market. We’re all impatient for more people to know it and know what it tastes like and be eating it. And the impatience drives like me and the other Southern Wisconsin Kernza grower, Willie Hughes of Hughes Farm. We are very keen to start working on a cleaning. set up for this so that we can start processing grain here in southern Wisconsin without having to ship it to the large cleaning facilities in western Minnesota.
Amy Flash forward to today, and Wisconsin is growing, processing, and even flaking its own Kernza, thanks to innovators like Nicole, Willie Hughes, Rooster Milling and East Troy, and so many others. And you just might find it soon in a taproom near you. Already, The Vintage in Madison and Lakefront in Milwaukee have produced limited edition Kernza beers. Not long ago, I talked with Joe Walts from Karben4 Brewing about his Kernza creation. One barrel of beer made with Kernza grown entirely in Wisconsin and processed here that sold out in about a week. I met him at the tap room just before that beer went on sale to find out what it takes to brew with an entirely new, mostly unheard of ingredient. When you approach a beer and I saw kind of the list of ingredients that you’re drawing from for this particular beer, how hard is it to incorporate something so new like Kernza.
Joe Um, I really didn’t know where to start. You know, my, my impression of Kernza is that it would behave a little bit like wheat in the brewhouse so that it would, it’s a very high protein grain, so it’d be useful for things like head retention and possibly it would lend some flavors that were, were similar to wheat, um, but it has a much smaller kernel size, so it’s not something that’s easily malted. It’s not something that’s easily milled. So I wasn’t sure that I would be able to use it exactly the same way as wheat, especially if I was gonna make a beer that really focused on wheat, like a hefeweizen. So what I wanted to do at first was just include it in a beer that would be more like, that would use wheat as a secondary ingredient, to promote things like head retention, your foam in the glass. Um, and maybe give it a little more mouthfeel and give it a little bit unique flavor. But I also wanted something that was a sort of, I’m trying to think about how to put this, um, unknown reference, I guess, you know, a beer where you roughly know what it’s supposed to taste like. So you can kind of evaluate what the Kernza is doing. Um, and maybe what I did was a bad compromise in the end, but, um, my wife really wanted to have. something like an English bitter on tap. I asked her this probably almost a year ago because I had an opening in the brew schedule and I was like, what do you want? She was like, oh, make an ESB, that sounds great. And so I started planning that and then I got a whole bunch of other requests for the schedule and so that kept getting pushed back and pushed back almost a year. And it coincided with the time that the flaked Kernza was gonna be available. And I was like, you know, this beer would probably be a pretty good base to showcase that. If I was starting completely from scratch, maybe I would have done a hazy IPA because that is one of the more popular styles right now. And Kernza may play well with that kind of beer. Its yield is comparable, at least the flaked Kernza. And I’m talking hindsight here because I already used it now. But the yield that I got was pretty similar to flaked oats. And its role as being a high protein grain that might promote haze and mouthfeel, you know, would be similar. So I think. know, brewers that are listening to this, think about how this grain could be used in your in your hazy IPAs. But I’m also dead tired of hazy IPAs. They’re, they’re, they’re popular. They’re, they’re delicious. You know, I’m not going to deny that, but they, they all taste very similar. And I was like, you know, I just don’t feel like brewing one of those right now. So yeah, just decided to do more like an old English IPA instead of a New England IPA.
Amy This is a total aside, but I’m totally with your wife on the English bitters because I used to live in England and I was always drinking the Old Speckled Hen, which was a local, uh, bitter, uh, English style bitter. So, uh, I’m excited to try what you’re, what you’ve made it and managed to do by incorporating currants into that. And I think, you know, this conversation shows how complicated it is to have, you know, we have this new, um, ingredient. good for the topsoil, good for water health, good for the climate, but it still has to taste good and work well and to kind of marry all these other ingredients. What would you say to another brewmaster or chef or anybody else who has the opportunity to try to use Kernza?
Joe So both on my experience and on talking to a couple other burgers who have already used Kernza, I would recommend getting it in flaked form. Again, because it’s too small to mill and the raw form is not going to provide a significant amount of starch because the starches go into solution at too high of temperatures. So unless you have some fancy equipment like a cereal cooker, um, like a large lager brewery might use, um, you’re not going to get much out of your curds and if you’re not going to get much out of it, that’s going to eliminate the environmental benefit because you’re adding it to your recipe, but you’re not taking anything else out, you know, you’re not supplementing barley with it. But if you use an inflate form, um, you don’t have to mill it. You can add it straight to the mash and you’re going to get a yield that’s that’s fairly close to flaked oats. So it’s not bad in that respect. One of the other challenges right now is the cost of Kernza and the farmers, they’re acutely aware of this, that there’s a need to bring the cost down but that shouldn’t stop us from trying to make progress. The cost isn’t going to come down unless the market exists to grow it and to do repeated fields over and over and do those things that bring the cost down. my strategy of including it for, I think I used it for about 11 or 12 % of the grain bill here is to come up with a way that it’s possible to absorb the cost. Yeah, the cost of your beer is gonna go up but not like it would if you were trying to make 100% Kernza beer, or even like a 60 % Kernza of beer like you would be for a German wheat beer. So, if you can find these small places to incorporate it, maybe enough people do and that provides. the stability for farmers to plant this again next year and see what happens. And then maybe the cost comes down a little bit and maybe a few more brewers do it. And then maybe the cost goes down a little bit. So, you’re investing in the future where, yeah, it costs a little bit more right now, but it doesn’t have to cost a lot more right now. And now maybe 10 years from now, we have an alternative to barley, or at least able to replace more of the barley.
Amy It’s interesting kind of that perspective on trying to use what you can to try to get Kernza going in Wisconsin, because I first talked about Kernza on this podcast about two and a half years ago. And at that time, there was no way to process Kernza in Wisconsin. Farmers who did grow the Kernza had to ship it to Minnesota to get processed. I don’t think there was any flaking happening here in Wisconsin of the Kernza. And when we were talking earlier, you said that that was a big motivator for you to help farmers by incorporating Kernza. Can you explain a little bit more about why that’s important to you?
Joe I just really like the idea of family farms still existing, and I think that being close to home is the only way that’s going to happen if you can give farmers a way to grow something that can be used locally, that makes them less dependent on having to compete in the global commodities market or the national commodities market. So I just think. you know, not just with Kernza and not just with breweries, but with, you know, anyone who’s using agricultural products. I feel like having it close to home makes a small business more viable. And so I want to be able to promote that. I want to be able to know the people who I’m buying it from. Um, this is going to be kind of a weird analogy because hop growers out in Yakima Valley are huge, um, but it’s still a niche industry in all of agriculture and so going out there to select hops, I’ve gotten to meet a handful of hop growers out there with their very big operations but still being on farms owned by their families for five, six generations and I just think that’s really cool. And so what I would like to see with grain, I would like to see grain become local that way hops feel local even though hops aren’t.
Amy And if you’ve paid attention to Wisconsin agriculture, you know our family farms are kind of rapidly disappearing. There are a lot of people out there who enjoy beer. Beer and Wisconsin kind of go hand in hand. Do you think people always realize the connection that those beers they drink can potentially have to keeping family farms in business?
Joe Um, I don’t, I don’t think so because I, I haven’t had conversations with that about people and it’s not really something that I, I realized until very recently, um, that, you know, I’m sort of pursuing this thing that I don’t even know why, um, until I really stop and think about it and kind of sort out in my head, what’s, what’s really there and it, and it, you know, sort of converged on, you know, something like, like promoting local farms. I think… that connection is a difficult one for breweries in general across the country, but I think probably slightly more so in the Midwest than in areas where craft beer has exploded faster, such as the Pacific Northwest and Colorado, because I think the Midwestern sensibility is always more inclined to do what your parents did but also it’s more complicated than that. I mean, Miller has been here for a long time. They’re not a Wisconsin company anymore but they have a very long and pretty amazing history here. And so if you go out into the places where a lot of grain is grown, people aren’t necessarily drinking craft beer. So that’s tough to get over. So, I think. It’s not just about people in Madison making that connection, but I think where long -term success happens is where you get people in the communities growing the grain, caring about the people making the beer who care about the people growing the grain. I think there’s got to be sort of like two -way education going on to really promote this really well.
Amy And I think it kind of also speaks to this whole initiative that Clean Wisconsin is a part of to get all these kind of cycles together for Kernza where farmers can grow it, farmers can make money off of it, but at the same time, brewers and chefs and anybody else can use it and people can eat it and that starts bringing the price down as more farmers grow it. It’s this whole cycle that everybody needs to kind of willingly participate in. And know that it’s gonna take a little bit of time. When you release this beer and you see, I think the excitement among all the people in this Kernza supply chain project, do you have a sense of kind of your importance and the link in this whole big picture of trying to get Kernza going in Wisconsin?
Joe Um, I, I don’t have a sense of it yet because it feels, um, I feel like I’m getting more credit than I deserve because essentially what I did was use seven pounds of Kernza and a test batch. And that’s not, that’s not going to pay anybody’s bills, but you know, I think if people come out and like the beer, hopefully it’ll be inspiring for people to keep growing the grain and keep working on this problem. Um, at opportunity, um, I hope I can talk my bosses into coming out so they can see that energy and think. okay, what are more what are more ways that we can incorporate this into, you know, hopefully our larger scale production. You know, hopefully other brewers hear me talking about this and kind of taking all this glory that I don’t know if I deserve. And being like, yeah, screw that guy, I can do better than that. So yeah, there are all kinds of ways this could be really, really cool. I’m excited.
Amy Well, maybe hopefully they don’t say screw that guy when they hear, but, um, but yeah. And I think there is excitement, um, because it does take, it does take some guts to do this on some level. You, you, I think with every beer you create is probably a little bit of a risk, um, when you’re doing something new, but using an entirely new grain. It feels like a, you know, a pretty big step.
Joe Yeah, it definitely does. I think, you know, it’s sort of like the Wild West. I had no idea what was gonna happen. I didn’t know. I was shooting for a beer that was gonna be like five and a half percent alcohol. And I’m like, if I don’t get any yield out of this grain it could be four. Beer ended up being six one. So, you know, a few different things went right. Mostly in the fermentation, I got about the yield that I assumed I was gonna get based on. um, the starch content of the grain, but yeah, it, you know, it could have gone very differently, um, and in the fermentation tank, I really like how it tastes. So, um, it’ll be interesting to see what happens after another couple of weeks of maturation and see if, yeah, see if that evolves and get some carbonation on it, that kind of delivers flavor. So, so yeah, it’s all, you know, anything really new like this is, is very exciting.
Amy People listening to this, unfortunately, probably won’t get to try any of this beer. It’s there’s a lot of excited people who are going to be coming at the at the launch and it’s one batch. So I think it may not last for months and months or anything. But is the hope to kind of, you know, as you mentioned, think about how Kernza can be incorporated into more beers, potentially.
Joe Yeah, definitely. This is the first starting point for us because, you know, I’m not the owner of this brewery. I’m not the general manager of this brewery. I’m involved in some of the discussions in sort of charting our strategy, but it’s also a very difficult market in terms of, you know, the demand for seasonal beers in large part has really gone, gone very down. there is a big demand in taprooms. There’s a seasonal beers, one -off releases, new things that still does well in taprooms. But I’m talking distribution, like liquor stores, supermarkets, other bars, very much almost no demand right now. So unfortunately our brewing equipment is on a scale. that’s meant for that kind of distribution. So we can’t just brew a production batch and sell it in the tap room. It’s gonna be here for a year and we’re gonna throw three quarters of it out when it gets stale. So, you know, my hope is to find ways that we can incorporate, you know, more sustainable grains like Kernza into our regular offering. So I’m envisioning, you know, Fantasy Factory has some. has some malted wheat in it and it has some flaked oats in it and probably the flaked oats are probably a more reasonable target than the malted wheat. But you know, could we pull the flaked oats out and put curds in and end up not changing the flavor to the point that people won’t recognize this Fantasy Factory? You know, it’s kind of kind of weird. Like you get excited about a new grain for flavor reasons and I think that’s part this pilot batch, but I would be excited if this grain contributed no noticeable flavor because it would make it more feasible that I could use it you know or contributed a flavor very similar to flaked oats because that would be you know a better way to solve the environmental problem but maybe not as interesting.
Amy Yeah, because I think Kernza has a flavor, which is why Lakefront named their beer Pretzel Wheat because it imparted a kind of a pretzely vibe to what they’d created. But yeah, everything you’re talking about is a slight risk, you know, to try to make these things happen. And so I think it’s so appreciated and needed for people like you to say, Hey, what can we do to make this a little bit better? What can we do to help farmers a little bit more or help the environment a little bit more when we’re making our very popular products?
Joe Yeah, no, thank you for having me on. This was wonderful.
Amy And yeah, the beer was very good, it’s all gone now. Thank you to Karben4 and Joe for letting us get a behind the scenes look at the brewing process and their willingness to create a Kernza test batch. For more information on Kernza, head to our website, cleanwisconsin .org. And if you have something you want me to talk about, a question or a comment, just send me an email, podcast at cleanwisconsin .org. I’m Amy Barrilleaux and this has been The Defender. Thanks for listening.
