Back to the Field: The Brewers Digging Up Ancient Grains to Change What's in Your Glass

Einkorn is not a grain most people can pick out of a lineup. Neither is emmer, or rouge de bordeaux wheat, or the handful of other ancient and heritage varieties quietly making their way back into American brewing. These aren't ingredients you'll find at a homebrew supply shop or in the ingredient lists of most craft beers. They're the kinds of grains that show up in agricultural history books, in conversations between obsessive farmers and equally obsessive brewers, and increasingly, in some of the most interesting beers being made in the US right now.

The movement to reclaim forgotten grains is small but growing, and the people driving it are motivated by something that goes well beyond novelty. For them, this is about reconnecting beer to the land it comes from — restoring a relationship between agriculture and brewing that industrial production quietly severed over the course of the twentieth century.

What Got Lost

For most of human history, beer was a local product in a way we've largely forgotten. The grains used to brew it were grown nearby, often specifically for the brewery or farmstead doing the brewing. Different regions developed different grain varieties suited to their particular soils and climates, and those differences showed up in the flavor of the beer. Place mattered in the most literal sense — you could taste the field.

The industrialization of agriculture changed all of that. Modern barley varieties were developed for yield, consistency, and ease of processing — qualities that matter enormously at scale but have almost nothing to do with flavor. By the mid-twentieth century, the grain going into most American beer had been optimized into near-uniformity. The connection between a specific piece of land and a specific beer had been almost completely erased.

"We bred the flavor out of the grain," says one Colorado-based maltster who works with heritage varieties. "We got really good at making consistent, predictable malt. What we lost was character."

Character, it turns out, is exactly what a certain kind of brewer is hungry for.

The Farmers and the Brewers

Reviving ancient and heritage grains isn't as simple as ordering a different ingredient. Most of these varieties haven't been grown commercially in decades — sometimes centuries. Seed stocks are limited, often held by agricultural preservation organizations or university gene banks. Yields are lower than modern varieties. The plants can be harder to harvest. The malting behavior is different, sometimes dramatically so, which means brewers can't just swap in an heirloom grain and expect their recipes to behave the same way.

What's made the movement possible is collaboration — specifically, the emergence of close working relationships between small-scale grain farmers and the brewers who want to use what they grow.

In the Pacific Northwest, a cluster of farmers and maltsters have been working together for over a decade to develop a regional grain economy built around flavor rather than yield. Varieties like Wintmalt and Alba barley, along with heritage wheats, are being grown, malted locally, and sold directly to craft brewers who've become invested partners in the agricultural process. Some brewers are visiting farms during the growing season. A few are helping to fund seed multiplication efforts for varieties that exist in only small quantities.

In the Northeast, similar networks are forming around einkorn and emmer — two of the oldest cultivated grains on earth, both of which have flavor profiles that modern barley simply doesn't replicate. Brewers working with these grains describe notes of nuttiness, earthiness, and a kind of savory depth that opens up dimensions in a beer that standard malt can't reach.

What These Grains Actually Taste Like

This is the part that's genuinely hard to communicate without putting a glass in your hand.

Einkorn, the oldest of the ancient wheats, brings a warm, almost honeyed nuttiness to beer — richer and more complex than modern wheat malt, with a grain-forward character that lingers in the finish. Beers brewed with significant einkorn percentages tend to have a roundness and a certain... weight to them. Not heaviness exactly. Substance.

Emmer, a hulled wheat that was a staple crop across the ancient world, skews earthier. There's a minerality to it, something almost savory, that gives beers a kind of savory backbone you don't often encounter. Brewers working with emmer often describe it as adding a sense of place — a specific, identifiable terroir that makes the beer feel rooted somewhere real.

Rye, which never fully disappeared from American brewing but fell out of mainstream favor, is having a particular moment. Heritage rye varieties offer more pronounced spice and a creamier mouthfeel than the commodity rye most brewers have access to. A roggenbier or a rye saison brewed with locally grown heritage rye is a meaningfully different experience than the same style made with standard ingredients.

And then there are the landrace varieties — locally adapted strains of barley and wheat that developed over generations in specific American growing regions, selected naturally for the conditions of a particular place. These aren't ancient in the global sense, but they carry a kind of regional history. Beers brewed with them taste, in a way that's real rather than metaphorical, like somewhere specific.

The Practical Challenges Are Real

None of this is easy or cheap, and brewers working with heritage grains are quick to acknowledge that.

Yield is the most immediate issue. Many ancient grain varieties produce significantly less per acre than modern cultivars — sometimes dramatically less. That cost gets passed on, which means beers brewed with these ingredients tend to carry a price premium. Not every customer is willing to pay it, and not every brewer can absorb the risk of working with ingredients whose behavior they're still learning.

Consistency is another challenge. One of the things industrial grain breeding optimized for was predictability — you know exactly how a standard two-row barley is going to behave in your mash. Heritage and ancient grains don't always offer that certainty. Enzyme activity varies. Conversion can be less efficient. A brewer working with a new heritage grain for the first time is essentially running an experiment, and experiments don't always produce the result you were hoping for.

"You have to be okay with learning in public," says one brewer who's been working with heritage grains for several years. "Some of the early beers were not what I wanted them to be. But every batch taught me something, and now I'm making beers that I couldn't have imagined when I started."

Why It Matters Beyond the Beer

The case for heritage grain brewing isn't only about flavor, though the flavor case is strong. It's also about what this kind of sourcing does to the broader food system.

When breweries commit to buying heritage and ancient grains from local farmers, they create economic incentives for those farmers to grow them. That matters for agricultural biodiversity — the more varieties being actively cultivated, the more genetic resilience exists in our food system. Industrial monoculture is efficient right up until it isn't, and the crops we've abandoned often carry traits — disease resistance, drought tolerance, adaptability — that we may badly need in a changing climate.

Brewing has always been an agricultural act. Somewhere along the way, that connection got abstracted into commodity purchasing and supply chain management. The brewers working with heritage grains are, in a very practical sense, trying to restore it.

The beer in your glass started in a field. The best argument for paying attention to which field, and what grew there, is that it tastes better when you do.