- Yeah, here in the Carolinas, keeping it local could mean farm to fork restaurants, where the meals come from nearby fields, or maybe dirt to shirt clothing sewn from homegrown cotton.

But how about grass to glass?

Local craft beer, made with barley that you barely have to leave town for.

♪ 'Cause there's a cold calling my name ♪ - There's no telling where they'll end.

They'll just keep growing and growing.

♪ There's a cold beer calling my name ♪ - I thought that micro breweries were just a fad.

Boy, was I wrong.

- [Sonier] Yep, barley farmer, Philip Sloop says the growing brewery business is also good for his brewery growing business.

♪ And there's a cold beer calling my name.

♪ ♪ Yeah Much of that craft beer getting its malt right here in Rowan County, from fields that used to grow wheat or soybeans or corn.

- Barley was never really viable unless you had cattle to feed it to.

♪ There's a cold bear calling my name.

♪ We have planted this year approximately 190 acres of two-row variety of barley.

- [Sonier] That's a lot of barley.

- It is.

It is.

- [Sonier] Sloop owns C and H Grain, here in the town of Cleveland, growing his barley on a friend's old dairy farm.

Other nearby farmers have barley for the breweries in their fields too.

♪ Yeah, there's a cold bear calling my name ♪ - They met with a bunch of growers and asked us who wanted to give it a try.

And luckily, we said yes.

Skeptical when they approached us but anxious to try something.

Can you be optimistic and skeptical at the same time?

They've sort of provided a safety net for us, you know?

Yeah, during the harvest, if you come to Cleveland, you'll see the trucks rolling by going to the malt house.

(gentle music) - [Goss] So everything comes straight from the field, straight to our grain bins here.

- [Sonier] Carolina Malt House founder, Aaron Goss, grew up here in Rowan County.

He was a lawyer before becoming a maltster.

Goss turning his home brew hobby into a craft beer career.

- Almost all the grain we've ever processed has been grown within 10 miles of where we sit right here.

- Yeah, this malt house is also in Cleveland, North Carolina, because for malt, beer's key ingredient, closer means fresher.

- On these shelves, we usually don't have more than about a six week supply.

Makes for better beer.

- So this is our gravity table.

- [Sonier] Starting with how this local barley is sorted and cleaned.

Also using a century old machine that's made of wood, which is good for the grain itself.

- [Goss] 47,000 pounds of barley.

- [Sonier] Goss shows us the huge tank he calls the barley jacuzzi, where all that Rowan County grain goes to soak, then drain, and then afterward, to these high heat kilning and drying rooms.

- All that barley is actually sitting, it's maybe two and a half feet deep right now, and it's.

- This is where Carolina Malt House develops all their different malty tastes that Carolina craft brewers and craft beer lovers look for.

- [Goss] So this is our milling machine.

- [Sonier] Then some of that malt is milled before all that malt is filled into these 40 and 50 pound Carolina Malt House bags that are stitched up tight.

(machine humming) The malt sacked, then stacked, then sold to breweries by the pallet.

- [Goss] Some breweries will take six pallets at a time.

And within a year of being in business, not even a whole year of being in business, beers made with our malt were winning state awards, national awards, and our malt placed third best in the world.

There is a different flavor that you'll pick up on if you try it.

- [Sonier] Which means when the barley's grown in Carolina and malted by Carolina, the beer tastes like Carolina.

- There's 10 different beers there that all highlight Carolina Malt House's grains and malts they give us.

Almost about 90% of the grain that was used from that came from Carolina, which, you know, again, very proud of that.

- [Sonier] Tripp Moser is head brewer here at Charlotte's Heist Brewery, where all these labels, all these lagers, are all local malts.

And here in the brewing room, Moser skateboards back to some of those same sacks of barley we saw at Carolina Malt House.

- [Moser] It's definitely my job to make sure we're having some of the top quality malt that we can get access to.

Been using malt with Carolina for approximately four years now, and we know it's gonna be the freshest we have available to us.

It's extremely clean, a little bit of sweetness to it.

(gentle music) This beer right here is called Tall Horns.

It's a Heller bock style German with a hundred percent Carolina grown barley from Carolina Malt House.

- Wow.

- And obviously, we love the fact that it's local, so there's a premium that, you know, we're sharing with customers by being, by going local.

(gentle music) - [Goss] Malt is the key ingredient that makes beer, beer.

Just having fresh malt is gonna make a world of difference.

I mean, talk to any cook, and they'll tell you fresh ingredients matter.

- [Sonier] So it's a grass?

- Barley is a grass.

Early in the year, it looks just like grass planted in rows.

- So we can call it grass to glass?

That's fair?

(laughs) - There you go.

That'll work.

That'll work really well.

(gentle music) - By the way, this Rowan County grain that's malted here in Rowan County as well, is used by 120 breweries in more than 500 beers in North and South Carolina, which is why the growers who raise this grass also raise a glass to the brewery industry.