Late last year, Brooklyn Brewery released an unusual beer, selling it in the Northeast through Whole Foods and at its New York City tasting room. While the beer had an eye-catching, bright orange package that clearly called out a style, Fonio White Beer also leaned into an ancient grain likely unfamiliar to most American drinkers.
Fast-growing and deep-rooted, fonio has been cultivated by West Africans for thousands of years, and it remains an important source of nutrition today. Drought-resistant and able to flourish in the sandy soils of the semiarid Sahel region, this grain—which looks a bit like couscous—is prized for its flavor as well as its properties. These traits have made it a more sustainable annual crop, even despite accelerating climate change—and that might be just what helps it to win over North American brewers.
[PAYWALL]
Brooklyn brewmaster Garrett Oliver first landed on the idea of brewing with fonio several years ago. He had watched a TED talk by Pierre Thiam, a celebrated Senegalese chef, author, entrepreneur, and environmental activist. In 2017, Thiam cofounded Yolélé to support biodiverse and regenerative agriculture and to provide economic opportunities for small farmers in West Africa. Fonio is currently the chief product that Yolélé is focused on processing, importing, and marketing in the United States, selling the grain itself as well as fonio chips, flour, and pilaf.
When Oliver decided to brew with fonio, he started small, making a pilot batch before releasing a 40-barrel batch of dark lager with Cajun Fire Brewing in 2021. Then came a 60-barrel batch of double pilsner with hip-hop group Run the Jewels last summer. So far, Brooklyn has worked exclusively with Yolélé to get the grain, and the brewery is now buying fonio by the ton.
“The grain is unmalted and makes up about 15 percent of the [Fonio White Beer] grain bill,” Oliver says. “Even at that relatively small percentage, it is easily recognizable in the flavor profile of the beer. Fonio contributes a fruity, winey, almost gewürztraminer-lychee fruit aromatic to beers. It also has its own amino acid ‘bitterness’ reminiscent of that in sake. It’s easy to work with—we have worked with a lot of raw grains in the past, so we have a good knowledge-set to work with here. It’s slightly less efficient than malts, but the difference isn’t huge.”
For the time being, Yolélé Fonio White Beer is a one-off, 52-barrel release. However, Oliver says he’s been impressed with fonio’s flavor and that he “absolutely” plans to work with fonio or another sustainable grain in the future.
The Push for Perennials
Widely cultivated around the world, grain crops such as barley have been hugely important to global nutrition for the past 10,000 years. More than 70 percent of our global caloric consumption comes from grain, with more than 70 percent of crop land globally devoted to it. At the same time, grains also contribute to the environmental degradation associated with farming annual crops. Specifically, annual crops typically require the application of synthetic nitrogen, herbicide, and pesticide and/or fungicide, all of which disturb and compact the soil, leading to erosion and nutrient depletion.
As larger swings in growing-season temperatures and other climate-related challenges continue to impact yields and quality worldwide, interest in sustainable agriculture and perennial cereal crops has increased. Perennial crops—which are those that live for more than two years—also save money.
Several years ago, the Brewers Association supported research on how to increase the sustainability of malting barley, including the development of perennial malting barley. Making this worthy goal that much more challenging, of course, is the fact that malting barley must meet high quality standards to be of value to maltsters and brewers. Ultimately, the team from the Department of Crop and Soil Science at Oregon State University found that the sustainability of malting barley could be improved in a more cost-effective manner via short-term solutions, such as no-till farming, multiple cropping, and emphasizing fall-seeded annual barley.
Writing for the journal Crop Science, the researchers concluded that “despite the wealth of genetics tools available, it would take considerable effort and time to develop a malting barley cultivar with perennial growth habit.”
In the meantime, crop scientists have found more success with wheat and rice. By crossing a variety of Asian rice with a wild, perennial variety from Nigeria and slowly improving its offspring over decades, researchers were able to create Perennial Rice 23 (PR23), making it commercially available to Chinese farmers in 2018. After studying the results from farms in three different locations for the past five years, scientists at Yunnan University found that PR23 averaged a slightly higher yield per hectare than annual rice for the first four years. Even better, it left more carbon and nitrogen in the soil—and, after the first year, it cost half as much as annual rice to manage.
Photo: Courtesy Brooklyn Brewery
Cracking into Kernza
Back in the United States, a nonprofit research institution called the Land Institute has been working toward a future defined by perennial, diverse, and regenerative agriculture since 1976. While helping to fund and support the development of perennial rice in China, it also continues to actively focus on developing perennial hybrids of sorghum in sub-Saharan Africa and wheat in North America.
In fact, the Land Institute already has found success domesticating Thinopyrum intermedium (intermediate wheatgrass), a distant cousin of annual wheat known by the trade name Kernza. It’s the first perennial crop that the nonprofit has introduced to the market. Current varieties of Kernza, which are farmed by only registered growers, have a three- to five-year productive window. Since 2016, it’s also made its way into a number of beers at breweries large and small.
The first example came from a collaboration between Oregon’s Hopworks and Patagonia Provisions, an offshoot of the well-known outdoor clothing company. Dubbed Long Root Ale, the recipe featured Chinook, Crystal, and Mosaic hops, and a grist that was 15 percent Kernza. A witbier and an IPA eventually joined the pale ale to form a trio of Kernza beers branded as the Long Root series, but all three have since been retired. (For more about Hopworks and Long Root Ale, see “Beyond the Barley: Craft Brewers Go Rogue on Grain Bills,” beerandbrewing.com.)
Then, last spring, Patagonia Provisions found a larger partner to help them bring a beer made with a sustainable grain to a bigger audience—enter Dogfish Head and the Boston Beer Company. Debuting in March, Kernza Pils quickly became one of the most, if not the most widely distributed Kernza beers available to date.
Sustain-A-Grain is one of the certified seed dealers, handlers, and growers working with the Land Institute to introduce Kernza to producers and consumers. According to Peter Miller, one of the three people behind the business, perenniality is key to unlocking the sustainable potential of grains. Perennial crops significantly reduce the number of passes equipment must make over a field, which saves on labor, fuel, and other inputs. They also significantly reduce erosion, preventing the loss of topsoil. And, finally, perennials such as Kernza have much deeper roots than annuals, making them more drought-tolerant and better at sequestering carbon.
Nonetheless, some disadvantages remain.
“We’re still improving the genetics, how we grow it, and how we process it,” Miller says. “As a result, the yields are low compared to other crops. That means the price is significantly higher than other grains. Kernza is currently selling for about $5.50 per pound. But Sustain-A-Grain is working to bring those costs down every year by investing in processing and working with the Land Institute to improve the genetics and yields.”
In time, yields are expected to increase to levels comparable to annual grains, and this will help bring the price down. However, there’s another obstacle that hinders more widespread adoption by the brewing industry: malting. Kernza can be brewed in its hull, as a dehulled grain, or as a malt—but it hasn’t yet been malted at a commercial scale.
“We have worked with a number of maltsters to malt small batches of Kernza,” Miller says. “The flavor has been great. But we’re finding that Kernza’s small grain size is a challenge for most malting equipment. It’s more similar in size to wild rice than to barley. In spite of these challenges, we’re moving forward with malting trials with Proximity Malt [in Colorado] and Riverbend Malt [in North Carolina]. We’re excited to see what might come of those trials. I suspect that as grain sizes get bigger through breeding, the malting process will get easier.”
Despite the high price tag—which Miller says causes many brewers to pass on Kernza—and the lack of a malted version, Dogfish Head isn’t the only beer company working with this perennial grain.
In St. Paul, Minnesota, Bang Brewing makes a session IPA, a cream ale, a blonde ale, and two different IPAs with raw, cracked Kernza. Maine’s Allagash used it in one beer in its From Maine with Love series. And, in northwest Arkansas, Ivory Bill Brewing has released several beers featuring Kernza.
“I had been following the work of the Land Institute for the past 10 years as they worked toward developing a perennial grain, and as soon as it began to be available, I reached out to them,” says Ivory Bill cofounder Casey Letellier. “I grew up in Minnesota, where the unsustainability of conventional agriculture is shockingly clear, so the benefits of a different model of agriculture were really compelling.”
Letellier, who opened Ivory Bill with his wife Dorothy in 2018, describes Kernza as about four times more expensive than the other brewing grains he buys. However, for brewers who care deeply about its agricultural impact, he believes that working with this new grain is a step in the right direction.
Plus, he happens to like the flavor.
“Kernza contributes a lovely nutty-spice note to the beer,” he says. “I feel like it is especially suited to maltier beer styles, where those kinds of flavors can really show off. In the context of a heavily hopped IPA, I think it would get a little lost.”
Letellier has brewed with Kernza as about 20 percent of his mash bill, and he says it needs to fall in the 15 to 30 percent range to make sure there are enough enzymes to convert it. At that percentage, he’s had good conversion and reasonable efficiency with a standard single-temperature mash. He’s also happy that he doesn’t have to spend hours hand-milling the tiny grains anymore—Kernza is now available pre-milled, so it’s much easier to work with.
Growing, Malting, Brewing with Purpose
At Sustain-A-Grain, Miller says he hopes the results of Kernza malting trials with Riverbend and Proximity will make it easier still for brewers to say yes to this perennial grain. He’s optimistic about the future. Besides malt, Sustain-A-Grain is actively developing roasted, torrefied, and flaked options for Kernza, expected to be available later in 2023.
Yolélé’s fonio is husked and milled by the mainly women-led cooperatives from which the company sources it. There is no malted fonio currently in active development, so brewers interested in supporting a more diverse, regenerative agricultural future by buying fonio will have to make use of raw grain for now.
For Oliver, that’s okay. His interest and motivation extend beyond sustainability. Buying one of the oldest cereal grains in West Africa is also a step toward alleviating extreme poverty in that part of the world.
“In our case, the driver here is personal,” Oliver says. “I was a founding board member of Slow Food USA and then sat on the governing board of Slow Food International for years. This sort of work is something I’ve taken an interest in for decades.
“Also, as an African American brewer, this means a lot to me, and I’ve seen that it’s also very meaningful to other beer drinkers and brewers of African background. We are often told that beer is somehow ‘European,’ when this isn’t even vaguely true. Beer is from Africa. So, the demand here will come from beer drinkers who are interested in sustainability, African culture, ancient grains, social justice, the environment, and really tasty beer.”
