Brewers Association Urges Barley Breeders to Prioritize Lower-Protein Varieties for Craft Beer

The Brewers Association put barley breeders on notice last week, issuing formal guidance to the American Malting Barley Association and the wider breeding community calling for a fundamental shift in how malting barley is selected and developed. The ask, delivered March 3, 2026, through a working group of the BA's Supply Chain Subcommittee, centers on one overriding priority: lower-protein varieties that can hold up under the heat and drought conditions increasingly shaping grain quality in the field.

The reasoning is straightforward if you've ever dealt with a batch that went stale faster than it should have. High grain protein, amplified by heat and drought stress, generates more proteolysis artifacts during malting, specifically elevated free-amino nitrogen and short-chain peptides that the working group identified as compounds that "negatively affect beer flavour." As the BA working group framed it, the climate trajectory is not ambiguous: average grain protein is expected to keep climbing, and the industry needs breeding priorities to get ahead of that curve now rather than compensate for it on the cold side.

The working group's consensus language called for "a selection of barley varieties that modify more gradually and thus have lower free-amino nitrogen (FAN) and other short chain peptides that negatively affect beer flavour." More gradual modification during malting means less proteolytic activity, which translates to cleaner flavor stability in finished all-malt beer. The group also proposed expanding the acceptable ranges for beta-glucan, FAN, and the soluble-to-total protein ratio, not to lower the bar, but to give breeders a wider pool of candidate material to work with. The ultimate breeding target, as the group stated it, is to "encourage breeders to select low-protein material that is more resilient to abiotic stress and can thrive even under dryland conditions."

The working group that produced this guidance was deliberately broad. The BA described its composition as a cross-section of membership running from brewpubs and taprooms all the way to large national brewers producing more than one million barrels across multiple facilities. That range matters, because the flavour stability problem the group identified is not scale-specific. A hazy IPA brewed in a ten-barrel brewpub and a nationally distributed all-malt lager both depend on the same upstream variable: the protein profile of the malt sitting in the grist case.

The Supply Chain Subcommittee's core mandate is exactly this kind of upstream intervention, monitoring hop and barley harvests, interacting with growers, and providing the brewing community with guidance on sourcing and ingredient quality. Drafting a memo to AMBA encouraging revised breeding selection criteria fits squarely in that role.

What the guidance does not yet include is specific numeric targets. The sources don't cite revised cutoffs for FAN, beta-glucan, or protein percentage, and AMBA has not yet issued a public response to the memo. Those details will matter enormously to breeders and maltsters trying to translate the BA's intent into actual variety trials and commercial seed stock. The science connecting grain protein, FAN, and flavour stability is well established in cereal chemistry circles, but the BA working group stopped short of citing empirical data or quantifying how much shelf life improvement a given protein reduction might deliver.

For brewers already buying malt on specification, this initiative signals that the spec conversation is going to get more detailed, and the pressure for it is coming from the climate as much as from the brewhouse.