Picaroons Hopes To Inspire Other Craft Breweries With Increase In Local Ingredients
FREDERICTON— The owner of a New Brunswick craft brewery hopes his company’s move to use more local ingredients will inspire others to follow suit.
Picaroons Brewing Company announced this week that it would be including more locally-grown ingredients in its craft beer portfolio, by switching to mostly malted barley grown at Hillview Farms in the Florenceville area. Previously the brewery used almost exclusively a heritage malting barley variety from Britain as the main ingredient.
Owner Sean Dunbar says the move was something he was thinking about for a while, but the Covid-19 crisis made him realize the importance of supporting New Brunswick agriculture.
“We need to make as much from what we can buy locally. It was something we figured out how to do,” says Dunbar. “It was a little bit of a risk, but it was mostly the crisis and the need to lead on a New Brunswick-first type of thing that made us get going right now.”
Picaroons were using some local malted barely before, but only in two of the 16 beers in its portfolio.
“Now, when we make the switch we’ll only have about three beers, maybe four that won’t have 90 percent local barely in them,” says Dunbar. “It’s going to be 10 times as much, I think.”
Dunbar says one of the big “risks” or sourcing malted barley locally is securing enough supply.
“There are only one or two growers [locally],” he says. “The big challenge is to count on the fact that they’re going to keep growing it. So to change everything, then have them say, ‘well, we didn’t grow barley last year, so you can’t have any this year’ or bad crops and things like that where supply is at risk. That took a bit of getting over. The back-up plan is to go back to what we were doing so that mitigates that risk a little bit.”
Though securing a local barely supply might be challenging, Dunbar says if more local breweries start wanting it, more farmers could start growing it.
“Malting barley would be a really good rotational crop for potatoes growers. When it works, it gives them a bit higher value rotational crop than they’re used to,” he says. “My thinking is always a little bit big. If more and more brewers could use local barely, it puts a demand on it, then many more farmers would grow barely and the system would feed itself and we’d have another good thing going.”
Dunbar hopes Picaroons’ move to source more local ingredients will inspire others to follow suit, not just with malted barley, but other ingredients as well.
“I’m not sure if everybody knows that it’s even available … and other breweries have probably used some in the past. But we just want to inspire people and tell them you can make your beer from ingredients that are grown locally,” says Dunbar.
“We supported hop growing for a long time, and the sad fact is that the small hop industry in New Brunswick, they don’t sell out of hops every year. So the brewers are not using enough local ingredients and we decided rather than lecture, we’ll just go ahead and do it.”