- [Announcer] "Montana AG Live," is made possible by, The Montana Department of Agriculture.

The MSU Extension Service.

The MSU AG Experiment Stations of the College of Agriculture.

The Montana Wheat and Barley Committee.

Cashman Nursery and Landscaping.

The Northern Pulse Growers Association.

And the Gallatin Gardeners Club.

(melodic guitar music) - Good evening, you are tuned to "Montana Ag Live" originating tonight from the studios of KUSM, on the very dynamic campus of Montana State University.

And coming to you over the Montana Public Television System I'm Jack Riesselman, retired professor of plant pathology.

Happy to be your host this evening.

In staying with this spring's theme, women in agriculture, we have a very special guest this evening.

I'll introduce her in a minute and you know how this program works.

You provide the questions and we'll do our best to provide the answers.

And without your questions, as I've always said, this gets pretty boring sitting here.

Anyway, let me introduce tonight's panel.

On my far left Mac Burgess.

Mac is kind of a jack of all trades, I guess, would be a good term.

He's actually a small farms agronomist.

If you have any questions about agronomy, small farms, tonight would be an excellent opportunity to get those questions answered.

Our special guest tonight, Jennifer O'Brien.

Jennifer is president of Montana Craft Malt Company, and it's quite an operation, we'll learn more about it during the rest of this program.

And if you have any questions concerning brewing, malting, things like that, the economic benefits to a state like Montana, good chance to answer those questions or ask those questions this evening.

Jamie Sherman, Jamie's here several times, she's our MSU barley breeder and the barley program here at MSU has really exploded over the last few years, especially with the craft malt industry exploding also.

Dave Bombar, Dave is a horticulturalist, beekeeper, and a lot of other things, again, a Jack of all trades.

So if you want any questions this evening about beekeeping, horticulture, Dave would be happy to answer those questions.

The phone number will be on the screen here shortly and get those phones, questions coming in.

And let me introduce our phone operators this evening.

It's Nancy Blake and Merit McKee, and so we're looking forward to having her here, answering the phones for us.

Jennifer, tell us about your business, I'm fascinated by it.

- Thank you oh gosh, where do I start?

Montana Craft Malt is a malting facility based just outside of Butte on the west side.

The footprint is about 80,000 square feet of covered processing area and warehousing sitting on about nine acres.

And in the simplest turns terms a malting facility, basically.

We buy grain from growers and it's barley, weeds and a handful of other things, for us, it's mostly barley.

And then through our facility, we turn that raw grain into malted grain that we then sell to brewers and distillers all over Montana and beyond Montana.

- It's quite an operation, a lot of people don't realize, but barley malt is using a lot of different products.

When we were young, I think everybody was somewhat exposed to Malt-O-Meal.

It's okay, it's not bad.

Then you kind of progressed to something a little more tasty in your teenage years, and that was Whoppers Malted Milk Balls.

But today folks, I'm gonna pass out what we now consider to be a little bit better malting product and Jennifer, there's some Montana breweries here, and there's also some that are not from Montana.

So tell us where you sell your malt.

Dave for you, a big one.

(laughing gently) - So the size of our malting facility, if we sold every ounce of malt we would need to sell about three times the amount of malt purchased by brewers and distillers in the state of Montana.

So the vision was never to have this facility support, just our one state, it was to make enough malt to compete sort of with the big leagues outside of Montana and in some cases across ponds.

So, but that said, wherever we're selling, our customers are small and medium size craft breweries and also some decent sized distilleries.

- So right now, as far as I remember, there's about 100 craft malt brewers in the state of Montana.

Do you provide malt for a large percentage of these now?

- That's a great question.

So there's just shy of 100 craft breweries in Montana right now, somewhat consolidated around, the I 90 corridor in the big cities, but also up in the northwest and in Helena and then some of the smaller towns as well, and we really love those hyper local breweries.

I would say that we've sold or continue to sell routinely to probably 70% of the breweries in Montana.

And there's a variety of products that we make and every brewer likes to make different beers with different recipes.

So it's not, we're selling different things across the state.

- [Jack] We'll get into that a little bit more, go ahead, Dave.

- Really basic what is malt?

- Yeah, good question.

And Jamie can tell you more about the science of that.

But basically it's grain, so in beer there's traditionally four ingredients and now there's some adjunct stuff people throw in there.

But it's water, yeast, hops and malt, and so we focus on just the malt.

So it's grain basically that we then soak in water for two days and then we germinate for four days and then we kiln, basically to crash the germination process.

And so in that last phase, we say at our facility, that's kind of where the magic is created with the flavor and the color of our finished mal product.

So, to the untrained eye, and this was mine four or five years ago in this business, the finished product doesn't look that different from the raw grain coming in.

But once you start using it and for any brewer, you know right away, it's lighter, it's crunchier, it's flavorful, it's colorful in some cases based on how we've treated it during our process.

- So the seed coats still intact?

I mean, the radical hasn't emerged or anything like that?

It's not sprouted?

- It is sprouted, yeah, it's sprouted a little bit, yeah.

- The timing has gotta be critical, right?

It's right on the verge of- - It is sprouted and so the endosperm's starting to be converted, those sugars are starting to be converted being made available so that when you're entering in the brewing process, that's where the sugars are gonna come for the yeast deferment.

- Okay.

- So you just get the germination going, just enough so that everything becomes available for the yeast to use for the brewing process.

- So, and we're on this subject, let me ask a question, follow up Dave a little bit here.

Say you take the variety malt in variety Buzz, which is pretty good in this state.

But can you make several different kinds of malt from one variety?

- [Jennifer] Yes, you can.

- How do you do that?

- So it's a very controlled process and we have lots of levers to pull with time, humidity, temperature, all sorts of things.

And we, just like brewers, we have our recipes and based on what we're trying to make, that informs what our process looks like.

So, there's a lot of characteristics that can be attributed to the finished product, but when you're talking about what kind of malt it is, a lot of times that's referring to how dark it is in color.

And there's lots of other properties, but there's a spectrum, a color spectrum.

And on the lighter side, there's a collection of what we call base malts.

And that's sort of the, around here it's called two row or it lends to a pilsner or pale.

And then as you mess with the processing and usually hire temp and longer time in the kiln or the oven, that's where you can inform darker, more flavorful, almost sort of roasty tasting malts.

- [Dave] The good ones, the really good ones.

- [Jack] Depending on your beer preference, yes.

- I'm learning here, where does the alcohol come from then?

You'll have some with 4%, some have 7% alcohol.

- Jack, this one's 8.2.

- Ooh.

- Specially for you.

(laughing loudly) What controls the alcohol content of beer?

- That's the yeast.

- Okay.

- The yeast converting the sugar to alcohol and how far that process is allowed to go.

And that's impacted by the recipes and the sugars available from the malt and so that's- - Yeah and ultimately the amount of malt you use.

- Right.

- So there's a lot of malt in that that can there.

- All right, well, we've talked a little bit about beer, let's talk about bees here, okay?

Change a little bit.

This question came in from Haver via Facebook.

This person is interested in getting into beekeeping, how would they start?

- So, I would highly recommend if you have the ability to take a in person class or an online class, so you can get the idea.

It takes a fair amount of time to kind of get up to speed.

So this is the time of year that bees are being shipped around.

So I installed bees last week and last weekend.

And so I bought bees as packages, and so they come three pounds of bees with a mated queen in a separate cage and then you put those in the hive.

So there's really only one time a year to get started with most traditional ways, either package bees or actually buying a little like half a hive called a nuc, a nucleus hive, and now's the time of year for doing that.

You can buy established hives or you can also capture swarms and try to hive those.

That's a little tricky for a beginner to do, but it is possible to start at a later period of time.

So educate yourself.

There are some in person courses, our colleagues over at University of Montana, have had it online, they have three different levels of training at that.

There's some online training from our colleagues at University of Minnesota, they have a bee lab that does a really nice job.

So you can get an idea of what it takes to keep bees in northern climate.

So it's a little different if you're gonna keep bees here, as opposed to the southeast or even in the midwest.

And then you have to obtain your equipment, whether you are putting it together yourself, it takes just a fair amount of time.

So you really need about a three to six month lead time to get started to be successful.

- [Mac] Okay, David, can I have bees just at my house in town?

- That's a great question.

And there are... That's another thing, once you've educated yourself, you should probably, before you even get that far, check and make sure it's allowed in your, if you're in the city, in a city, whether or not there are any ordinances associated with beekeeping, I don't think there are many in the state, but a good idea to check.

And then also identify a really good site for your apiary.

So one that gets some sun, especially if you can have it face to south that's ideal, there's some wind break on the west or north side.

If you're in town, you wanna maybe orientate the hive so that they have to fly up and over a high fence or a shrub, so they're not, you're kind of just coming out of the hive and being right where there might be pedestrians on the sidewalk.

But yeah, I see be hives in Bozeman all over the place.

- Kind of interesting.

Follow up question here is where do you get the bees to stock on a hive?

- So most of us in the western US get bees from bee ranches that are located in central valley, California.

And they literally shake three pounds, which is roughly 12,000 bees into a box, a screen box, that's about the size of a shoe box.

You can manipulate other colonies to breed excess number of queens.

And then you...

They're either shipped to you, there's a outfit up in Polson that traditionally makes a trip down to pick up a truckload worth of bees.

The bees that we got this year, the worker bees were actually shook from a apiary in Montana.

but the queens were reared in California 'cause we just haven't had enough warm weather to do queenery.

- Interesting.

- So yeah, there were 300 packages picked up at the old Kmart parking lot a week ago, Friday, there was a line of cars waiting, there So people got multiple packages, but yeah, it's a really fascinating process how we move bees around the country.

- Okay, thank you, Dave.

Jennifer from Livingstone, this person knows there are several malt facilities in Montana.

What makes Montana Craft Malt different than the other ones?

- That's a great question.

There are a handful of malting facilities in Montana of various sizes.

Malt Europe up in Great Falls is massive, probably 400 times the size of us.

And there's other ones that I would say are more in line with the hyper local market.

So quite a bit smaller than us.

What's different about us is our size in our versatility.

We're right in the middle of the big ones and the small ones.

And oftentimes smaller malt houses can do lower volume, small batch specialty malts, and they do a really good job at that.

A couple of them here in Montana and then the bigger ones do base malt at a commodity scale for some of the macro brews that you're probably aware of.

With the size of our facility, and the versatility of the vessels that we have in it, we can do many small batches at the same time.

So we like to think of ourselves as a bit of a Swiss army knife in the facility world that we can do lots of things.

So we can produce base malt at scale using multiple vessels, or we can do small batch specialty malts at a bigger scale than some of the smaller malt houses can do.

And then some of the bigger malt houses because of their batch sizes, they can't actually produce specialty malt, it's done at a smaller scale.

So what that allows us to do it allows us to produce both based in specialty malt, but it allows us to become a partner to smaller malt houses who can't produce at our scale in bigger malt companies who need our specialty facility capabilities.

- Okay, so now you buy grain?

Do you contract with growers before they even plant seeds?

Like we want you to grow X number of acres of Buzz or this variety.

- Exactly and I'm glad you mentioned Buzz.

We're gonna malt a whole bunch of Buzz this coming year.

We've got contracts with Buzz in the ground.

And as Jamie knows, it's a really good Montana sort of born and bred story.

And we're excited to see how that performs.

- [Mac] Jamie tell us how that got its name.

- Yeah, so we- - It's that 8% beer.

(laughing loudly) - That's true.

- No, it's not.

- So it's named after a grower Buzz Matlin who was always very supportive of the barley program at MSU, Buzz, I would say was fundamental in the barley program continuing.

He has provided so much service by participating with the Montana Wheat and in other sorts of endeavors like that, and has always been very supportive of So we thought it would be great to honor a grower, and so, and plus the name just fits, right?

- It's a nice name for a barley, it really is.

Mac question from Bozeman here.

This person mulch their garlic and would like to know whether or not is time to take the mulch off.

- Gosh, I don't know that you needed the mulched in the first place it probably...

I've never mulched garlic and I grow great garlic reliably, but I see people mulch garlic, and that works fine too.

And I've seen people who leave it on and I've seen people who put a lot of work into taking it off.

So unless you've got rodents breeding in it, I don't know that you need to.

But it's not gonna hurt anything to take it off or to not have put it there in the first place.

Either it's gonna affect the growth of weeds, that might be one of the reasons to leave it in place, it makes pulling weeds easier.

But if you're trying to hoe weeds, that's how I deal with it.

- So if you didn't have his reliable snow covers, then mulch is more important, for over wintering?

- I don't know, I've never seen a problem with garlic not surviving- - It's pretty tough.

- Yeah, maybe there's some place with just where the wind blows all the snow away and garlic won't survive, but I'm not familiar with that being a problem.

- A follow up to this, and this is interesting.

We've had a serious vole problem again this past year, I think everybody knows that.

This person wants to know, will voles eat garlic?

- I don't know, 'cause I don't mulch garlic.

- You probably have voles under there.

- Yeah I've seen voles cause damage to other crops extensively.

And I think we've seen that, that their population can be increased by having a place to hide from their predators and so mulch or crop residue or just un-mowed areas can increase their numbers for sure.

- Okay, from Facebook.

"Last week, it was mentioned that alcohol "does not react well with some mushrooms that we consume."

This person says, "I remember morel mushrooms as really not "agreeing with me and I haven't eaten them in decades.

"Possibly, I was having some alcohol with them.

"Could you tell us which mushrooms "alcohol reacts negatively with?"

- I can take that one if you need.

- Well, you got it, yep.

It's an individual thing, some people react differently to mushrooms if you're having a glass of wine or two with it, others do not.

So it's not the mushroom, it's the individual.

- There is a particular mushroom Coprinus is the genus and inky cap.

And you do find them in the mountains here and they are a prime choice edible mushroom that will interact with some of the byproducts of alcohol degradation in your liver and make you very, very sick.

It's one of the similar, it's not life threatening, but you feel sick to your stomach for sure.

So stay away from inky caps and alcohol.

- I don't eat inky caps, they're not very attractive.

- They aren't very appealing, but they taste good.

- To some people, I wouldn't recommend eating inky caps.

- I wouldn't even eat them the morning after you've had a couple beers.

- Okay, all right.

Jamie question from Three Forks this person would like to know if the variety of barley used to make malt affects the taste of the beer.

- Well, that's sort of been a area of conversation over the last several years and of course the maltsters and the breeders want it to be so, and so we've actually been doing some research in that area.

So we've looked at hundreds of different varieties and analyzed them chemically.

And what you're seeing on your screen is actually just four of those varieties.

And so on the far side, you'll see the different chemical compositions, which won't mean that much to you maybe, but there are some different flavor components that are being pulled out of those different varieties.

And so not to say that one is better than others, but just to have the diversity of flavor is what a brewer would really be looking for.

And so that's sort of our holy grail, I guess I would say is that we would really like to be able to identify specific flavors associated with specific varieties that would then be able to broaden the market a little bit more.

- Okay, couple questions for Jen.

Number one, "How many different types of malt "does Montana Craft Malt make?"

- Oh, good question.

Actually, can I add on to Jamie's real quick?

So we, as maltsters firmly believe that variety does have, inform some flavor and there's that piece, there's also on the processing side, the way that we control processing also So it's combination of both.

But we're interested in the data that Jamie has because it just sort of, I think will reinforce what we already know truly in our guts.

So how many products do we have, was that my question?

- Yeah, how many different types of malt?

- We have stuff that is available for sale and we always have a kitty of stuff that's in R&D and some of that stuff is intentionally designed.

And some of that is what we call, happy accidents.

And some of the more popular malts out in the industry have actually been created almost on accident.

And we like those stories and it's not that we're not watching our process and trying to prevent accidents, but when it happens, it's not always a bad batch, sometimes it's a new product.

But that said, I think we have probably eight or 10 available for sale right now.

And we have a handful of things in R&D.

And then we also provide a service for other malt houses, as I was saying some bigger and some smaller that might need to augment their product portfolio with things that we can do, either our capacity or capabilities.

And so we produced a number of products that are sold frankly to other malt houses and put in their bags and sold to their customers.

- Okay, so if I'm a brewer and I wanna make an India pale ale, do I contact you, and you say, oh, this would be an ideal malt for this particular...

I mean, they've probably obviously done R&D on their end and they've got a recipe, but- - Yep, I would say 99% of the brewers that we serve have been around a lot longer than we have, we've only been in operation for two years.

And so they usually have a pretty good idea of what type of malt they're looking for.

But our master maltster is also a very technical brewer.

And so if a new brewer or even an experienced brewer wants to engage on a new recipe or something, he can certainly provide guidance and samples for testing before they actually buy a big haul.

- So this one I'm looking at here says it's hazy.

I used to think of that as not a good thing, and now it's now it's the new trend.

And I understand that to be caused by protein in the malt at some level, and that could be taken care of in the brewing process, that could be from variety, that could be from growing conditions.

I bet you concern yourself with it- - I think it's so fun to watch the trends in brewing and that affects the trends in malting as well.

We have to keep an eye on what the end product is and we select our varieties and control our processing accordingly.

But sours come in and out, hazes come in and out.

There's times when hoppy beers are in and then multi beers are in.

We personally are looking forward to maltier days, but Jamie, I would say it would, in the hazy beers, is that a lot of wheat malt?

- It is, but I don't know if that's what causes it.

I don't... - If there was a market for high protein barley, some growers would probably be happy for that, I suppose, right?

- Not with the fertilizer prices today.

- Oh yeah.

- Okay, another question for Jen from Polson, "How many bushels of grain is in a batch of malt "that you're talking about?"

- Bushels of grain in a batch of malts.

So, oh my goodness the different ways that we do math with bushels and acres and all this stuff.

So we would say, I talk in pounds all the time, but in each barrel of beer there's usually about 70 pounds of malt.

And then if you go upstream, the conversion is usually about 1.2.

So, or the yield is usually about 80% on grain.

So if you do that math, what would you say with how many bushels?

- A lot.

- A lot, yeah.

- So 100 pounds of raw grain turns into 80 pounds of malt.

- That's average, sometimes we better or less yield, but that's average.

- Okay, speaking of that, and we mentioned a little bit earlier, Dave asked, where are you contract?

Where are you getting your barely, statewide or Gallatin valley or?

- So most, for the past two years, most of our grain has come out of the Gallatin valley, Gallatin, Madison valleys.

And we've had really good quality grain.

And all of Montana's known for really good grain, but we've had, we've used both irrigated and non irrigated acreage and for a small malt house where it matters so big right away, your malt quality, garbage in, garbage out.

But we got really lucky with taking in really good grain.

And one of the reasons our facility is where it is, is within 100 miles in any direction we're gonna hit really good grain.

Good climate for growing sophisticated growers, everything lines up.

We have customers, as I was telling you, who we, other malting companies that we process for, and sometimes they send us their own grain and they might get that in Washington or Idaho or North Dakota, and we'll take that into our facility as well.

- [Jack] Okay, thank you.

- Now, Jamie, some of the irrigated production areas in Montana grow a lot of barley, but there's a lot of dry land malt barley grown as well.

Do those end up going in different directions as far as end use?

- Well, I think irrigation is often used to protect against risk.

So your quality is gonna fall down in a drought, or if you have high heat during greenfield and so irrigation can help protect against that.

And so especially the bigger companies will mitigate their risk by contracting a lot of irrigated acres.

Everybody is thinking more about sustainability though.

And so what I'm seeing is that people would like to move away from that.

And I think it's gonna take us producing some more research to show that we can produce some varieties that will do well under dry land conditions and that they don't have to necessarily mitigate the risk that way, at least not fully.

And so for example, we have a stay green variety that we are showing has a greater percentage of deep roots during grain fill.

And it maintains those roots throughout green fill.

So if our water cuts off, those varieties are gonna have access to that water, and so they can maintain their quality without putting as much water on them.

And that's really the research that we are, that's our next variety that we would like to really release for the growers of Montana really.

So they can protect against risk of drought, and then that helps the maltsters too.

And then the down road, the brewers as well.

- Okay, thank you guys.

From Bonner, this person is planting grass and other seeds in a bare field that when watered, it takes a long time to penetrate the soil to a relatively shallow depth.

What's going on with that?

So basically you have water, but it's not penetrating.

- Well, it could be a matter of the texture of the soil or even a sodicity issue.

But it could just be compacted as well, we'd need to see that place, yeah, and see the location.

- So a heavy tillage would probably help that out somewhat?

- It might, that might not solve the problem.

I'd need to look at some other things and think about the texture and the sodium content of that soil, for sure.

- All right and really dry soils after drought, a lot of times it's hard to penetrate with water.

- Yeah and these things are relative too, maybe you're putting it on too fast, possibly.

- And from Rug Creek, how can she find out if a mushroom is Basically animals are pretty smart.

They generally will not eat something that does not agree with them, but if they do get into something, the poison control center in Billings would be who you'd want to contact for that.

- I have to digress, I have a Labrador retriever.

(laughing loudly) - She likes mushroom.

- She would find the dried up ones from last year under the duff, so.

- Okay and it's been healthy.

- Hasn't been deadly yet.

(laughing loudly) - Relatively speaking.

- That's it, I'm just saying.

There are certain animals out there that like to eat everything.

- Well, feed her.

- I do, twice a day, she gets me up.

- Okay.

- Sorry.

- For Manhattan, do you use malt in products like coffee stouts?

- Coffee beers, yes.

- Coffee stout beer, which is not my favorite by the way, but.

- Yeah, I would imagine probably some darker roasted malts give it that nice dark, dark color.

- So every beer has got base malt in it.

And then you add the specialty malts that she was talking about that add those different flavors.

And so those real rich beers, all the different types of beers have different quantities of those special malts.

- And we say specialty, they're basically roasted or essentially burnt in the case of.

- Well, you can call them a caramel you can call.

them a Vienna malt.

You can, but they usually have a richer color, a more of a caramely flavor.

- The richer beers like that, they're generally higher in alcohol content or not?

Is that my perception and is true?

- I think that's the perception, I don't know if it has to be.

So it doesn't, you can have a dark beer and it not be high in alcohol content.

- Okay, that I did not know- - So the darkness doesn't have to do with that.

- And I think the flavor that some people might find overwhelming from an IPA, dark beers don't have to have a lot of hops either, right?

- They tend to not have as much, they can- - But there are styles that are dark in color and yet relatively mild in flavor or complex.

- Not bitter.

- Right, not bitter.

- So the bitterness, a lot of the bitterness comes from the hops.

- Right, okay.

- But you can get bitterness from those really dark roasted, like coffee's bitter, those dark.

- Yeah, I like a lot of different flavors of beer, but coffee stout just doesn't quite cut it with me.

- Coffee for breakfast.

- Coffee is good for breakfast and maybe a beer for lunch is fine, but the two combined, that's not, you don't agree?

- To each their own, we won't- - We just know who's retired now because you have a beer at lunch and it's like.

Maybe I'd be more liked at the (indistinct) if I had a beer at lunch, they'd come.

It's like, don't talk to David until it's after lunch.

I'm just saying.

- Okay, from Polson again, somebody up there is very interested in the malt process.

They wanted to know, "Can you make malt out of things other than barley?"

- Yes, all sorts of fun grains.

We make actually quite a bit of wheat malt.

And then you can do oats, rye.

Somebody really wants us to try malting lentils, but we haven't gotten that creative yet.

Yeah, so lots of other grains.

- [Jack] Now, I like chickpeas.

- I like chickpeas too, on my salad.

- Good point, it may not go well with beer.

- Usually even with those specialties, they've got barley in there too.

'Cause the base malt is usually barley and that's because barley brings more of the enzymes necessary to make the malting process happen.

It's kind of like the engine behind it that makes those other things work.

- Yeah.

- So a long time ago I went to a marketing, I was in a marketing class and there was a distributor was from Anheuser-Busch.

And so at that point he said Budweiser made and the Western US had obviously base Barley Moped also had rice malt and in the Eastern US, it was corn malt.

- So sometimes people call those brewers adjunct brewers because they're getting their sugars from rice or corn.

But you still need the barley to have the enzymes and so those other things happen.

But usually the craft malsters, they're all malt brewers.

and so they usually don't use those additives- - So the rice isn't malted?

- I don't think it's usually malted.

- Okay.

- I think we would call that an adjunct and the idea is just have more alcohol with less- - So it's like a rice syrup?

- The whole grain could go in.

But the important thing is that the barley provides the enzymes to convert that starch to sugar and it has less body.

So lighter body pilsner type beers that don't have a lot of mouth feel or substance to them but you wanna have a higher alcohol.

Those typically have a fair amount of rice or corn in them, right?

- Okay, okay, back to bees.

This person Roshoto is interested in They want to know if Dave is concerned about any diseases or pests that can cause problems in new hives.

- Yeah, so there's a, unfortunately there's a whole host of pests and pathogens that impact bees and in our climate really the biggest pest is the varroa mite.

Well, it's the biggest pest across the north America.

And it feeds on the...

Bees don't have blood per se, but they have a fluid that carries oxygen around, so it feeds on that.

And what makes it even more insidious is that it spreads viruses.

So you have to have a plan to manage for a varroa mite in place.

And people say like, well, I don't know that I'm gonna get mites, you will have mites.

The way bees move around and so it's ambiguous across the US, you will have varroa mites, and so you have to have a plan in place.

If you don't have a plan in place to manage for varroa mites, then you won't have bees very long.

- Okay, from Sholdon, there could also be the potential of four-legged pests.

- Oh yeah, you got bears and skunks.

And we have little boards with nails sticking up, so the skunks would come at night and they would scratch the outside of a hive and then tap bees as they come out to see what's going on and eat them.

So we won't want skunks, there's a lot of things.

You think about a beehive at the end of the summer has 100 and plus pounds of honey, how many calories are in there?

- More than I need a lot.

- There's a lot of calories.

So yeah, it's an attractive source of groceries for a lot of things.

- Okay.

- So David, if I get a package of bees in the mail today and I install it or whatever the word is, can I expect as much honey off of that hive as a hive that's two, three years old that I've kept around?

- No, it takes, especially if you're starting with all new equipment and all new frames, it takes quite a bit of energy for the bees to draw all that wax out.

So we call that the foundation, you have a sheet of foundation, but then you have to draw all that foundation out.

And so it takes eight pounds of honey to make a pound of bees wax.

And so it takes a lot of energy.

So like I'm feeding bees right now, I did today, I went out and I put half gallon canning jars, full of really heavy sugar syrup in there to give them that energy to start making wax so that they could draw out the foundation on this new equipment.

- And then even if you do everything right, you still got a chance that your hive's not gonna make it through the winter?

- Yeah, it's not a hobby for the faint of heart.

You can do everything right, and they can be just in the wrong place and a cold snap comes down and they can't get to the food.

That's perhaps the most frustrating thing as you go in, there's like, your hive died, it still has 20 pounds of honey.

But the honey was here and the bees were down here and it was 20 below zero and they just physically couldn't get up to it.

They don't hibernate, they're actually keeping the queen at 70 degrees fahrenheit all winter long.

They spend the whole winter consuming honey and shivering to generate heat.

And so that's why it's really a challenge.

- Could you bring them in your garage or something?

- Well, there are people that...

They call them cellaring, so yeah.

In fact there's a publication, Bob Goff gave this to me, now we're going back.

- [Jack] Yeah, we are.

- Bob Godd gave me a publication from the 1900s, Montana Ag Experimentation Publication, and it showed on the outside of a house, it was in a little shed that was just a little bit wider than a beehive and it had shelves in it, and there were like six or nine beehives in there and they'd stuff straw around it and they had doors on it.

So, and in Canada, it's very common to cellar bees in like what's essentially a potato cellar.

So it has to have ventilation so that you don't have that carbon dioxide build up.

So yeah, you could go to extreme.

People wrap hives, I used to put straw bales around them.

Typically they can handle pretty cold weather, but there are things you can do to help get them through the winter.

- Thank you, I'm learning a lot about bees I didn't know.

- There you go, I'll bring a hi out to your house, Jack.

- Okay, I'll let you handle the bees.

Okay, from Bozeman for Jen.

"Are there other things you use malt for besides beer?"

We mentioned a couple of them and Jamie, you can jump in too.

What are some of the other markets for barley malt?

- So brewers, but also distillers who are making all malt whiskeys and we hear there's a big comeback with all malt whiskeys and frankly, our second biggest customer is a distillery and they use a ton of malt.

So brewers, distillers, there's also application in food and we currently are not selling any malt into the food market, but I think there's huge potential there at some point in time.

And what I'm learning and you probably know more about this is that the R&D cycle in food is much longer than it is on the brewing side of things.

And there's like this gold rush to plant based protein right now.

And there's some thought, and we've been approached by some companies doing research there, is there an application for barley and their malted barley that's then milled down into flour or whatnot.

And we have another large food company that's taken some samples of our higher color specialty malt because of the interesting flavors, and it actually adds a little bit of a reddish color into products.

And so, that's probably two, three years down the road for us.

We have, we're basically selling all the malt we make right now, with our current footprint.

And so as more learning comes out on the food side of things, what the various applications for our type of malts are.

And if we can service that, that will be a decision we can make down the road.

- Okay, sounds good.

We had a question come in after the program last week and the person sent a photograph in, it's a dead ash tree, and boy we've had plenty of dead ash trees around the entire state the last couple years.

This person would like to know why and all the suckers, what will they produce a tree, Dave?

Or should they just start over?

- So we get a lot of this die back when we have a mild fall and then the temperature just drops rapidly.

And the trees haven't had the time to properly harden off to get through winter.

And so at the end of all the growing points, they produce a hormone called oxen and it actually suppresses latent buds that you find further down the branch.

And so when those growing points die back, all hose buds that were latent can sprout.

And so you, the picture that they showed had hundreds, if not thousands of these suckers that have sprouted out, but they'll never form a real branch because they don't have the branch collar, there'll be no strength there.

So there really isn't a whole lot to do about it, and the tree's probably on its way out.

- It's chainsaw material.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, okay.

You gotta be blunt sometimes you can... - Gotta channel my inner Adam Ferguson.

- That works.

Jamie the location was not given, but this person would like to know what percent protein and weight per bushel is most desirable for malt barley?

That's a good question, sometimes we kind of neglect the basics.

- Well, the percent protein want to be at around 12% or lower.

And that's because the protein is surrounding those starch molecules, we're trying to get at the starch to use it for fermentation, and the protein's kind of in the way.

And so too much protein is bad for malt barley, as far as for brewing.

The distillers don't care so much, right?

They'll take a higher 14 even.

So they don't have a problem with it.

What was the other question, the weight?

- That was part of, and test weight.

- So the test weight though, I think a more important measure is just that the seed is plump and it's got to be, it has to not pass through the certain size screen of six, over 64- - The perforation.

- Is the size of this screen and it's gotta stay on top of it.

90% of the seed has to stay on top of that for it to be useful.

And that's just because that big pump seed is gonna have a lot more starch in it.

And so the maltsters don't wanna mess around with any little thin seed, so.

- So all malt whiskey, what is barley malt that the distillers use, what does it turn into?

What kind, scotch?

- Over in Scotland, yes.

- I didn't know what the grain for that is.

- Barley, they use a lot of barley on scotch.

I can attest to that, my favorite.

But I don't know, what do the distillers that you're selling to, what do they make out of it?

- They're making all malt whiskeys.

And it takes a while for it to be available to the marketplace, it has to age.

- [Dave] Right, but they can't call it scotch.

- [Jack] No, they can't call it scotch.

- There's a new trend towards American all malt whiskeys, I believe that's starting to happen, and that opens up a whole new marketplace for us.

- Learning something all the time.

Dave, again, from Polson, this person thinks there's a variety of Asian bee that can live with the mites and the virus.

If so, could it be bred with honeybees to provide resistance?

- So there is some tolerance to the mite in a strain of bee that comes, we call them Russian bees so far east of Russian, so.

And so there was some interest in that.

it's really interesting that global movement of bees and bee semen is highly regulated.

So the USDA has a lab that's off the coast of Louisiana on an island far enough that the bees can't fly inland.

And so that's where the initial importation of this Russian genetic material came in there.

So you'll see that and there's all sorts of...

So honeybee biology's really pretty fascinating 'cause there aren't many points in the whole process of a life of a beehive where you can actually have genetic diversity happen.

So the queen bee mates multiple times, but just for like a week in her life.

And so the concept of having a hybrid bee's it's kind of challenging because when new queens are produced and they're out in the environment and they're gonna meet with pretty much whoever.

So you think about, and there are breeders that do this, think about artificially inseminating a bee.

- [Jack] No, thanks.

- It happens.

- I'll stick with barley.

- Think about, so you can buy an artificially inseminated queen that has a lot of these characteristics and from that generate breeder queens that you would sell to other bee ranches, it's really complicated.

And a lot of times that hybrid characteristic doesn't stick because they don't self pollinate.

Well, they actually do male bees are genetically identical to their mom, but we could be here all night.

- No thanks.

Mac, this person would like to know how often they need to mulch their raised beds.

They have a bunch of raised beds, they'd like to mulch them, they need to do it every year?

- Yeah, I guess it depends on what your objective is with the mulching.

If you're trying to keep a, just the appearance of something on the surface that's uniform, I don't know that you need to every year, but when it's broken down to the point where it's not doing what you want anymore, you could add more.

I think of that primarily in a sort of a landscaping sense.

I'm not a big fan of mulch in a vegetable garden myself.

Although I see people doing it successfully here and there too.

It depends on your objective, right?

- Okay, thank you.

From Bozeman, probably somebody here at the university, they would like to know if, from Jen, if you work closely with the barley lab here at Montana State University.

- We do, there's with Jamie's group, the barley breeding lab and also the malt quality lab.

We're really, really lucky.

As a malting facility to have this resource at MSU 80 miles away from our facility.

We get to be sort of in the know on the varieties that her group is working with.

And then also sort of give some feedback about the kind of things that we're looking for in grains and that feedback loop and being able to be part of that is really special.

Something not all malt houses have access to.

And then on the malt quality side with our finished product, it's industry standard, you send your sample off to an accredited lab to provide what we call a certificate of analysis.

And that basically tells brewers about the important properties in the finished product.

And it's good to have third party lab like they have here do that.

And so in other, there's only a handful of those in the country, maybe not even a handful.

- [Jamie] Three or four.

- Three or four, yeah, so to have one an hour away, sometimes other malt houses might have to send something across the country and wait a couple weeks to get results.

And I live in Bozeman, work in Butte.

So basically I'm move samples back and forth on my way home from work all the time.

And usually by the next afternoon we And so what that allows us to do is, fortunately our maltster has a pretty good batting average of nailing the specs.

But if anything doesn't look right for whatever reason he can dial the process upstream in other batches so we don't have any issues.

- Okay, Jamie, are you guys working on additional varieties?

I'm sure you are, a specialty varieties of barley that people like Jen, Montana Craft Malt might want.

Are you follow what I'm saying?

- Yeah, so a part of the breeding process is to improve quality.

We also worry about ergonomics too, but we are looking at the quality and that's why we like having the malt quality lab, 'cause we do all those quality measures in house.

We've also started brewing stuff.

And so then we can see how it works in the brewing process too.

So all of that informs the breeding program.

That it's been such a great gift for me to have that data and to understand those So that's like showing some tasting going on where we actually taste our samples to make sure that we like the quality.

So lines have been released that maltsters go, this tastes bad, we don't want that to ever happen to us, we only wanna release lines that taste good.

- [Jack] Go ahead.

- A perishable.

- The shelf life is long, as long as it's kept dry.

- It's a dried product, if it it's controlled, yeah.

- So to keep inventory moving and to manage the operations of our facility, we try to take it in and malt it within six months.

And I think that's on the high side, probably the highest side.

But as long as it's dry, we wouldn't have any issues even much longer than that, I would suspect.

- How quickly do you sell it though?

How quickly does it leave?

- Right now, everything we make is sold and going out the door.

So it fits at the warehouse when it's finished for 30 days or less on average.

The specialty malts sometimes because brewers buy them in smaller volumes, that sits longer.

But we track all that, so we can manage freshness of the finished product.

- Fascinating, let's switch over to a question from Dylan and either Dave or Mac can handle this one.

This person has a young honey crisp apple tree that's three years old and a deer came along and rubbed it badly.

One fourth of the bark is left from about two feet above the ground.

Can this tree survive?

- A fourth of the bark, it could survive.

- You think it could, if not, can you cut it below the damage and have it grow back?

Not like that.

- No, not unless there there's a bud.

- If there's a bud to grow back - Yeah and you have to remember, it's grafted, so it's on a root stock that's not honey crisp.

So if you cut it too low, you get a- - Three years old, so it's Dylan maybe, yeah.

(indistinct) - The odds are, in my opinion, you're not gonna have a very good tree.

(indistinct) - I've seen some get girdled nearly, entirely and... Not the ones you're thinking of and.

- Are we back to the voles.

I lost 30 eight year old apple trees to voles in one winter.

- No kidding.

- Yeah.

- You didn't fence it low enough?

- There are this big around and they stripped that bark clean a foot to foot and a half off the soil surface.

- That was probably four years ago or so?

Yeah, we did have a bad vole problem.

Well I have you up Dave, this person has half a beehive.

is that called a nuc in UC?

- [Dave] Could be, yeah.

- Okay and they bought it this week and wondering when they can start harvesting honey.

- So on a really good year and so by a good year we mean, and we've had at least in the Gallatin County, we've had really good moisture.

It's been cool, and so hopefully we'll have a lot of nectar produced.

And so if you have a really good honey flow as the term you'll use, you potentially could get some honey off of it this year.

Usually we say the first year, you're not gonna get a honey crop because it's more important for the bees to draw all that foundation and they need 80 pounds or so of honey to get through the winter 80 to 100.

So they have to have two big boxes is kind of the traditional strategy before you can make honey for yourself.

- How many bees in a normal sized beehive?

- 40 To 50,000.

- That's amazing and- - You sure you want one at your house?

- Yeah, I do, I definitely do.

I'm fascinated, especially since I've heard you talk about bees so much, it is fascinating to see them and we have lots of things out there that they can use for nectar, okay.

- So David, it sounded like you said, maybe they could, is there some action they would need to make in say August or September say it's a really great year.

Just have some honey for me versus just for the bee?

- So the one thing that the beekeeper could do, if you have a really strong honey flow is to make sure they have adequate number of, we call them honey super.

So those extra boxes you put on top so that they don't have any, they don't run outta room to store it.

So this is fascinating to me.

So when the nectar comes into the hive, it's 85% water and 15% solids, mostly sugars.

Honey is just the opposite.

It's 15% water, 85.

So they have to dehydrate all that water out of it.

And so they're constantly moving the nectar that's stored in the hive around and using their wings to move air over it, to dehydrate it.

So if they have ample space to do that of drawn foundation, they can bring in more nectar than they can process at the time.

And they can process it once things dry up in August.

- Okay, I'm learning a lot more about bees.

Do you teach a class in bees?

- So yeah, we have a segment in pollinators manage pollinators and part of hort 310.

- Okay, we're getting a little low on time, but I do wanna get this question in, it's from Billings, from Facebook.

"Does anyone know if any Montana entity "is supplying candy companies with malt?

"Also, how is the process of malting for candy "different than for alcohol?"

- It's not different, it's not different for bread, it's not different for beer, it's not different for candy.

But I don't know if anybody's- - I haven't heard of anybody doing it.

- Is a potential there down the line, do you think?

- There could be.

- Shipping.

- Shipping is a challenge and we're pretty stuffed from a capacity standpoint with breweries and distilleries right now.

I think, like I said earlier, I think food is very interesting, candy being a part of that, but my facility is a handful couple years away from that exploration.

- All right, Mac, quick question.

This person from Bozeman says they wanna plant their potatoes, is it time?

- By the calendar, it's pretty darn close to on time.

This is kind of a cool year, I would maybe wait till the end of next week after.

- Any time pretty- - It's about time.

- Okay, folks again, thank you for watching this evening.

Jen, thank you for coming, I've learned a lot about malting and the brewing process.

Jamie, thank you for being here.

As always Mr. Smiley's here and folks we'll be back next week.

Erica Rodville a graduate student in entomology, one of the future leaders in agriculture will join us talking about some alfalfa projects.

Thanks again for watching, have a good week and goodnight.

- [Narrator] For more information and resources, visit montanapbs.org/aglive.

(soft melodic music) - [Announcer] "Montana AG Live," is made possible by, The Montana Department of Agriculture.

The MSU Extension Service.

The MSU AG Experiment Stations of the College of Agriculture.

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And the Gallatin Gardeners Club.

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