“There’s this joke that it can’t be local enough in Asheville,” said Brent Manning, co-founder of Riverbend and supporter of a movement to shift Asheville’s reliance on grain to local sources.Ĭlearly, that demand is growing with the beer industry. It could be a boon for local farmers, and also for locals in general who may soon see beer certified by the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project and eat bread that expresses the local terroir like wine. Recent barley and wheat trials show Western North Carolina could be ripe for its own niche-market grain production to support both the burgeoning beer and bread industry. Barley is a standard malt grain, but it’s mainly been relegated to animal feed in this part of the country, with most malt coming from large-scale producers thousands of miles away. Malt, or germinated cereal grains, is an essential ingredient in brewing beer, along with yeast, water and hops. To open an avenue to truly local beer, Riverbend Malt House began floor-malting grain in 2011, providing an alternative to the large-scale, mass-produced malt market. With a city as locally focused as Asheville, it’s a curious fact that in some locally made beer, the only thing local is the water.
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