Visit Rogue Farms and learn about Risk malting barley

All hail the Rouge Nation Department of Agriculture. When it comes to actually supporting and growing local ingredients to use in craft beer, Rogue Ales and Spirits invests heavily in native and natural ingredients — like its hop farm in Independence, Ore., a strategic alliance with the Coleman family, heritage hop growers in the Willamette Valley (which is basically hop Shangri-La). The famed Oregon brewery also has its Rogue Barley Farm, which is part of a 3,800 acre ranch on the Tygh Valley Bench in eastern Oregon. It grows some 200 acres of malting barley there. In late February, its Rogue Farms counterpart posted a blog noting that tiny shoots of its Risk malting barley were starting to sprout. In less than six months, the barely will be ready to harvest and malt.

“We’ll harvest the grains, then floor malt them and micro malt them in our Farmstead Malt House here on the farm,” they noted in the blog. “Then we’ll truck the malt to our brewery in Newport where Brewmaster John Maier will mash them into future batches of Rogue Ales and Spirits. Risk and Dare malting barley are just two of the ingredients in the Rogue Farms proprietary palate of flavors.”

Learn more about Rogue Farms and specifically the Risk malting barley harvest in the video above. Just watch out for the funky floating text (don’t drink and edit folks).