Why should brewers care whether their grains were grown using regenerative practices?
“Brewers should care because consumers care,” says Amy Germershausen, VP of new product development at Milwaukee-based Proximity Malt.
Beyond the importance of sustainability, that’s the bottom-line argument that proponents of regenerative farming would like to make: If you support the crops, customers will support you. There are also reasons to be optimistic that such practices could yield plumper barley that makes tastier beer.
Proximity officially announced its ReGenMalt line in April at the Craft Brewers Conference in Las Vegas. With support from a U.S. Department of Agriculture program called Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, Proximity is working with some of its farming partners to convert to regenerative practices. They’re also measuring the outcomes, aiming to create a premium market for the resulting barley.
In truth, what exactly constitutes “regenerative agriculture” isn’t succinctly defined. But what is clear is that conventional agriculture tends to leach the soil of nutrients, creating greater reliance on artificial inputs such as nitrogen fertilizer as well as herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides.