The Brew SiteVarious beer tidbits
→ To no real surprise, foreign beer is not served at the White House. I have to wonder, though, since Anheuser-Busch, MolsonCoors, and SABMiller are all foreign-owned companies, why are they going to serve Budweiser and Blue Moon?
→ Sierra Nevada Brewing is going to be releasing one of the world’s only estate-made beers. I really like this idea, and I’d love to get my hands on a bottle of their Estate Ale to try. I would love to see other breweries doing the same kind of thing, though there’s a reason that there are only very few doing so… how much barley does an acre of land produce, anyway?
→ CHOW picks 10 great summer beers, a quick and fun read. Good list, although I’ve been enjoying my own summertime homebrewed Ginger Wheat Ale as of late.
To answer your question (because it’s slow at work and I’m surfing beer sites): barley yeild varies (obviously) based on weather and local conditions. I grew up in North Dakota, the top producer of malting barley in the nation, and yeilds back on the farm of 50 bu/acre were not uncommon even on the relatively poor land where I grew up with its dodgy rainfall. In the red river valley, yeilds probably averaged more like 60-70 bu/acre maybe more, I’m guessing here.
Let’s assume 50 bu/acre as a low rule of thumb. According to the interwebs, malting barley is defined as being 34 lbs/bu. Standard all-grain homebrew recipes would require in the neighborhood of 15 lbs/five gallon batch for a strongish IPA. So let’s just assume 10 gallons per bushel to make the math easy. That means you could make 500 gallons of beer (that’s 16 barrels or 32 kegs or 3,968 pints) off a single acre. Even a tiny field (by agricultural standards) of 25 acres grows enough barley for lots and lots of brewskis – like in the neighborhood of 100,000 if my math is right.