I was sitting in the shade enjoying the lovely Belgian ale on tap when someone asked me what I thought about two-row barley. I am lucky enough to live in a region where I can get either six-row or two-row most of the time, so I adjust my grain bill to the recipe at hand, rather than the other way around. Many brewers prefer two-row barley for its greater extract value; on examination that’s interesting, since the difference is 1 to 2 percent, hardly noticeable at the homebrewer level. I generally prefer two-row, but I’m not sure I could quantify why, since both types appear in many of my favorite beers. Maybe we all think two-row is just more chic.
Two-row or six-row? It’s a very American question. Most of the rest of the world uses six-row barley only for livestock feed, not for beer. I thought six-row barley had been bred especially to increase output, but it turns out to be a naturally-occurring result of a pair of mutations, one dominant and one recessive. Both two-row and six-row barley have been around for a long, long time.
Breeding efforts of the last half-century have reduced and perhaps functionally eliminated most of the differences between the two types of barley. Economies of scale at big breweries make many of their differences moot. There are still distinctions between kernel size, extract, protein and enzymes—all this information can be found online, depending on your tolerance for technical detail.
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much fun in Kingsport that we immediately agreed. Gene and Stephanie are a blast to hang out with, so we were excited that they were going to do it too.
One of the more problematic things to really achieve as a judge is decent palate education. You can’t do it by simply drinking more beer. In fact, unless you drink a lot of defective beer, and styles you’re not fond of, and otherwise great beer that’s considered off style: drinking more may be counter-productive when it comes to educating the palate. An occasional defect session run by your homebrew club is great, except these are flavors, aromas and other parameters you need to be very familiar with; time is not your friend: memory fades, can even change.
A few years ago I brought a case of Sam Adams single hop series: where they took their Latitude 48 and made several versions with only one hop each, to a Music City Brewers meeting for all to try. I think we found it educational… so I was already interested in being able to understand how different hops affect beer. This concept seems to have been filtered into something called The Hop Experience, where homebrewers can take a very simple beer, usually a light beer, and put different hops in it.
Nose: oak, a little sweet. Mouthfeel sweet with some oak clinging to the roof of the mouth. Bourbon in still in the mix, but lighter. A little bourbon cling, but not as dominant. In #1 barrel aged the spices were obvious, though background. In number two I think the oak, with the bourbon almost perfectly counter balanced, made the spices kind of disappear.
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