Travels with Barley (32 page)

“Do you know what Budweiser stands for?” he asked me.

I was going to answer “King of Beers” or something like that. But he cut me off and said: “Because U Deserve What Every Individual Should Enjoy Regularly.”

“Where did you hear that?” I wanted to know.

“Dallas,” he said—declining, though I pressed him, to elaborate. “And because of that commitment, I've always drunk it since.” (I later checked with the Bud people who say they've heard this slogan but they didn't make it up.)

When I asked Jeff about Clarksdale, he went off on a long discourse about contemporary race relations (better than they used to be), the arrival of gangs in the Delta (there were plenty of them, he assured me), and whether there ought to be slave reparations (there shouldn't be, he said). I steered him back to beer and asked my Perfect Beer Joint question.

Jeff leaned back, looked toward the ceiling in contemplation and closed his eyes for a long time. Then he said, without opening his eyes: “Loose women. In short-shorts and little tank tops. Pretty women and cold beer.”

That's when I knew Jeff was an optimist.

I doubted I was going to get a much better picture of beer culture in the Delta than that. So in a bit, I bid Jeff and the Ground Zero good night and headed for my motel.

Boundary County, Idaho
—It's a hazy morning, the sun leaching lemon light through the gauzy smoke of the forest fires drifting down from Canada next door. But the haze can't diminish the manicured beauty of what Don Kloth sees from a rise off Idaho's Highway 1. Endless rows of hops vines, dappled with cones, stretch toward a horizon framed by the evergreen rises and huckleberry barrens of the distant Selkirk Mountains.

Kloth (rhymes with tooth) is admiring not just the verdant sweep of hops and their wild surrounds but the symmetry of it all. Contemporary hops fields are staked out in large, interconnecting grids rimmed by tall utility poles supporting sturdy steel cables strung every twenty-eight feet. Flexible wires, the thickness of phone lines, are strung between these cables, serving as guides for rows. Lengths of hemp rope are hand-looped over these guides, pulled taught, and staked down to form simple Christmas-tree-shaped trellises. The vines (technically called bines) are trained to climb clockwise up these trellises, five or six vines to a rope, to a height of about twenty feet.

There are about 900 plants to an acre and by this time of the year—August, the traditional harvest month—they fill out thick and lushly green as kudzu, and brim with fragrant hop cones that will soon be plucked, dried, and baled for use.

“Being from a farm myself, the science of getting these poles in a straight line—now that's something,” Kloth says, admiring the scene below him. “I don't think we had lasers when we put these in originally.”

Kloth has a good reason to be impressed, since he's done the math. This operation, known as Elk Mountain Farm, sprawls across 1,800 acres hard up against the Canadian border at the tip-top of the Idaho Panhandle, making it the largest contiguous hops farm in the world. At 60 poles per acre that means 108,000 poles lined up arrowstraight—a daunting task in the shifting geometry of interconnecting grids. Of course, if the poles weren't lined up absolutely straight-arrow, Kloth, something of a perfectionist in a company thick with perfectionists, would get them straightened out pretty quickly.

Donald W. Kloth, sixty-two years old as of this writing, grew up on a corn, wheat, and soybean farm near the southern Illinois town of Sparta. He went on to Oklahoma State University to claim the ultimate farm boy credential—a Ph.D. in agricultural economics. He's parlayed that into one of the more unusual jobs in America, which is why I've diverted from my quest to catch up with him in a location far from the Mississippi River. He's the nation's (and perhaps the world's) top beer farmer.

True, nobody grows beer but plenty of people grow the stuff that goes into it, principally barley, rice, corn, wheat, sugar, and hops. In 2002, farmers in nineteen states sold more than $850 million in raw materials to the nation's beer companies, including 4.8 billion pounds of barley malt, 1.8 billion pounds of rice, corn, and other grains, and more than 15 million pounds of hops. Kloth, by way of his corporate position, is both a grower and buyer of staggering portions of these beer commodities.

His formal title is chairman and chief executive officer of Busch Agricultural Resources Inc. (BARI), the agricultural production and research arm of Anheuser-Busch Cos. BARI was founded in 1981 as part of Anheuser-Busch's quest for manifest beer destiny—a destiny staked to notions of quality defined, in part, by bedrock consistency. All major beer companies have acquisition divisions to manage the purchase and delivery of raw ingredients. But no other beer company in America (or the world) has an operation approaching BARI's ambitions, sweep, and economies of scale.

Kloth wears other corporate hats; he's a senior vice president of parent Anheuser-Busch and once worked directly for Patrick Stokes, Anheuser-Busch's president and chief executive officer. But his main job is to ride herd on BARI and its quality-is-everything mission to research and develop, grow, and/or acquire the staggering tonnage of raw ingredients, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars a year, that go into Budweiser and Anheuser-Busch's twenty-nine other beer labels.

Kloth is a big guy of mild Midwestern sensibilities and, as might be expected, given his employer, a beer drinker, though lately a carb-and-calorie-minded one fond of Anheuser-Busch's latest light beer offering, Michelob Ultra. He has the measured speech and inquiring temperament of an economist. But his is a high-stakes job, fraught with challenges and perils. Imagine having to manage consistency when you make more than 100 million barrels of beer a year at a dozen separate U.S. breweries and two abroad. Yet if you really want the Bud brewed in Newark to taste the same as the Bud brewed in China or St. Louis, a key element of the quality chain is that you simply can't leave your barley malt, your rice, your corn, and your hops to chance. “The company was growing much larger and we decided we needed to be much more insightful in our quest for quality,” Kloth says of the rationale for launching BARI. “The more we've learned from this the more we wonder why we didn't do it before.”

These days, the agricultural unit is a far-flung enterprise with 1,100 employees in thirty locations scattered over eleven states plus Canada, Germany, Argentina, Uruguay, and China.
BARI
operates twelve massive barley elevators, half of them in North Dakota, that form the staging areas for the storage and shipment of about 70 million bushels of barley annually. It runs six Midwestern and Western barley contracting offices that oversee the contract growing and purchase of the remainder of the company's barley requirements, plus three seed production facilities that churn out seed stock for its contract farmers. BARI's three malt plants in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa produce 28 million bushels of malt each year—almost 40 percent of Anheuser-Busch's total requirements. BARI operates two rice mills, one in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and one in Woodland, California, that acquire and process about 375,000 tons of rice annually, a figure that still only accounts for 60 percent of Anheuser-Busch's rice usage. The company actually is the nation's single largest user of rice, consuming 15 percent of
all
domestic rice production.

Beyond that BARI also funds an ambitious barley research program in Fort Collins, Colorado—in fact, it is the largest private breeder of barley in the U.S. The program's goal is to produce new barley varieties that, when malted, will not only conform to the taste profiles of Anheuser-Busch beers but also be trouble-free to grow, disease-resistant, and prolific. Such research is increasingly important as Anheuser-Busch needs to feed the malt maws of its two overseas breweries, one in China and one in the United Kingdom, plus seven other foreign breweries where Bud and other products are brewed under license. And this is, after all, a company whose motto is “Budweiser: One World, One Beer,” and that once a week flies in beer samples from each of its breweries to St. Louis. There, they must run a taste and aroma gauntlet of picky brewmasters, the pickiest of all being August Busch III, who personally samples each for consistency.

For beer purposes, only two kinds of barley matter: two-row and six-row. Two-row predominates; indeed almost all European and U.S. brewers use two-row barley exclusively. The notable exceptions: Anheuser-Busch and SABMiller, which use two-row but also copious quantities of six-row barley malt. (The Anheuser-Busch explanation is that, in essence two-row barley malt produces a smoother, sweeter-tasting beer; six-row a crisper, snappier flavor. Beer Geeks, though, tend to look down at six-row.) Barley research, meanwhile, isn't work for the impatient. “In barley,” says Kloth, who joined Anheuser-Busch in 1970 after working as a private sector economist on the Russian grain deals of the previous decade, “you're always working fifteen to twenty years ahead. It takes twelve years to get a simple hybrid cross into production” and “we probably throw away 75 percent of what we test.”

Kloth had explained this to me at an early morning breakfast meeting at a Best Western hotel in Bonners Ferry, Idaho, a pleasant town along the scenic meanders of the Kootenai River. We'd gathered there before jumping in SUVs for a twenty-six-mile drive north to the Elk Mountain Farm, which lies near the border town of Porthill, Idaho. In the production scheme of things, the farm, in operation since 1987, is relatively small potatoes—it only provides about 8 percent of Anheuser-Busch's hops needs—and it isn't BARI's only hops farm. It operates a second though smaller one in northern Germany near the town of Huell. But Elk Mountain's stunning location (on a latitude with northern Germany hops-growing regions) and its importance to BARI as a hops experimental station make it one of the jewels in the crown of the BARI empire.

Kloth, who had flown in from St. Louis on the A-B jet in the company of two publicists, had brought along to this meeting Blake Cooper, a Ph.D. plant geneticist who runs BARI's barley research operation in Fort Collins, and Gary J. Wittgenstein, BARI's director of North American hops operations and manager of the Elk Mountain Farm. The breakfast talk soon turned to hops but Kloth and Cooper wanted to make sure I understood how central the barley research mission is to Anheuser-Busch. I got the impression, when listening to the depth and passion with which barley was being discussed, that BARI barley people think, talk, and plot barley as much as the Swedes think, talk, and plot sex. It's far from an uninteresting topic but I'd asked to tour the hops operation during harvest because a) I was now out of the closet as a Hophead and b) if yeast is the mojo of beer and barley malt the soul, hops provide the sex appeal—the perfume, the spice, the heat. I also wanted a look inside the vaunted Anheuser-Busch quality control machine.

Elk Mountain is, relatively speaking, a newcomer to the hops scene, and hops, relatively speaking, got to America rather late in beer history. As noted, the Dutch, Germans, and people of the Czech lands were putting hops in their beer by about the eleventh century, though there are records of the Romans introducing them into Britain as a vegetable, and of the Germans using them for medicinal purposes, well before then. Hops are native to North America and the temperate zones of northern Europe and West Central Asia and they are grown in places as far-flung as Russia, Zimbabwe, Australia, and New Zealand. But they weren't cultivated in America for beer purposes until the early 1600s. Native Americans, however, knew the wild hop plant,
Humulus lupulus
, or wolf of the woods, as both a sedative and a toothache remedy. Of the hemp family, wild hops can still be found along America's temperate river bottoms; the hop's nearest relatives are the nettle, the elm, and, as I'd learned earlier, hemp or
Cannabis sativa
.

By one account, hop roots first came over on the third ship to return to the British Colony at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts. The first recorded beer hops garden in America was established in 1629 near the brew houses built by Dutch brewer Adrian Block. By 1648, hops were being grown in Virginia and continued to spread throughout the rest of the colonies. America's first big commercial hops venture was established in New York State in the early 1800s; by 1849, New York was the hops-growing capital of North America, producing more than a million pounds a year and by 1920 almost 21 million pounds annually. But a blight called downy mildew (and a second called powdery mildew) all but destroyed New York's hops industry in the 1920s (it is just now beginning to make a small comeback), and hops cultivation began to migrate westward toward states with drier climates and reliable sources of irrigation. By 1950, it had largely shifted to California, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.

As of this writing, the U.S. is the world's second largest hops producer behind Germany (it actually has led world production in previous years but growers here started cutting back acreage in 2001 because of a worldwide glut). Of the some 36,000 acres of hops cultivated in America nowadays, virtually all are grown in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, California's hops industry having also been decimated by the mildew scourge in the early 1990s. Hops growing is a small universe; there are only about seventy hops farming operations in America, many of them family-run ventures. They produced 68.8 million pounds of hops in 2002 with a value of about $113 million. By far the most productive region is Washington State's Yakima Valley, with about 77 percent of the total; Oregon was second with 15 percent and Idaho third with about 8 percent.

The hop is a strangely delicate plant. Once rooted in the right soil under the right conditions it grows like a weed and can, after being cut back in the winter, rebound and produce cones for up to ten years from the same planting. This is why hops are popular as ornamentals throughout the Northeast, upper Midwest, and Northwest. But the hop plant is picky about where it will take hold and flourish. It likes the loamy terrain of river bottoms and for the most part it only grows between the 35th and 55th degrees of latitude. It requires long hours of daylight during the growing season but needs a cold, dormant period as well. And history has shown that because hops are so susceptible to the mildew scourges, they can't sustain themselves longterm in climates with even modestly rainy summers. That's why latitudes like the semiarid Yakima Valley and Boundary County, Idaho, with their sixteen-hour summer days, dry weather, and ready sources of irrigation that allow watering of the hops roots without getting the plants wet, have become America's new hops havens.