DRINK

Think brewing is all about hops? Think a grain

Two local operations are helping to bring back barley as an Ohio crop

Story and photography by Brian Williams

Pity the poor little cereal grain. Barley barely registers with the crowds imbibing at Central Ohio craft breweries, while hops pop up in the punny names of brews and breweries across the land.

Despite what non-aficionados may think, hops are an added flavoring and preservative rather than a foundation of brewing. Meanwhile, the more significant ingredient of barley is in the name of a single local craft pub—Barley’s Brewing Co., one of the granddaddies. But the grain’s profile may be rising with the growth of two local enterprises that process Ohio-grown barley, wheat and rye for brewers and distillers.

Matt Cunningham came home to the Marysville area to farm with his father in 2009, a few years after graduating from Ohio State University, and he brought new ideas with him. While commodity prices for corn and soy are strong now, they are notoriously volatile. Cunningham wanted to seek new markets and diversify the crop rotation at the family’s 2,600-acre Rustic Brew Farm. Barley for brewing seemed a good start. improve his soil, but also to strengthen a local economy that included a strong brewing scene. “It’s super rewarding to know your customers—and seeing their customers enjoying beer or spirits.” Cunningham has also added a small milling operation, producing flour from wheat, barley, rye and oats.

For the barley, Cunningham had to first study the crop and the malting process—and invest in huge drums to malt the grain. That’s another part of the Central Ohio brew world. Heritage Equipment in Plain City historically manufactured stainless-steel containers for farms and dairies. Today it also makes and sells them for local craft breweries. The company fabricated the containers Cunningham designed for his malt house.

Ryan Lang, co-founder of Middle West Spirits, is working along the same lines with Origin Malt, but at a scale large enough to serve craft brewers and distillers throughout Ohio and into surrounding states. Origin contracts with farmers (he calls them “seedsmen”) within 300 miles of Marysville. They collectively grew 15,000 acres of barley in 2019, and the acreage continues to increase.

Jason McKibben

a century ago, before Prohibition. But it’s a big jump from the 500 acres being grown just five years ago. Ohio once had some of the nation’s largest malting facilities, and Columbus, Cincinnati and other cities were dotted with breweries much larger than micro. But by the time Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the state had lost not just the acreage and malt houses, but also the malting expertise. In the decades since then, high-quality brewing ingredients have tended to come from abroad. Malting migrated to Canada, and the Pacific Northwest became a haven for hops.

Then in 2016, Little Fish Brewing in Athens unveiled a session ale believed to be the first all-Ohio brew in over a century, using Rustic Brew’s first crop of malted barley and Ohio Valley Hops from the Cincinnati area.

That was three years after Lang began reaching out to seedsmen and other potential partners who would become part of Origin Malt—and one year before they began producing barley malt. Lang and partners do not have their own malting facility yet, but have a planned site in Marysville. For now, they ship barley from Ohio and nearby states for malting at a Canadian facility, and they send their own maltsters to do the processing. “It’s our customized material for our customers,” he says.

Lang’s seedsmen, like Cunningham, grow winter barley, a cover crop that is harvested in June, in time for the same fields to produce a second crop of soybeans. Thus, Cover Crop was an appropriate name for the blonde ale that North High Brewing Co. launched in partnership with the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation for its centennial in 2019. hops from five different Ohio growers. Barley, as a cover crop, increases soil health and decreases nutrient runoff into waterways. McKibben says Ohio brewers use water from rivers and streams to make their beer.

“Cleaner water makes better beer,” he says. “And we can improve the water by growing the grain we need for brewing. It completes the circle.”

The winter barley has a thicker, tougher husk, which is a malting challenge. The grain has to absorb water, and then germination takes about a week (compared to four days for Upper Midwest and Plains states’ spring barley). But the thicker husks can make more flavorful malts, McKibben says. He also uses Rustic Brew malted wheat for North High’s Honey Wheat lager.

What does this mean for the unheralded status of barley? As a professor of chemistry and physics at Ohio State University, Pat Woodward might be interested in the “enzymatic conversion potential” of malted barley. But as the proprietor of Pat’s Pints, a long-running local-brewing blog, he’s focused on the beer.

Over the years, he says, “I’ve come to the conclusion that the base malt is the most important part of any beer. If craft lagers continue to rise in popularity, maybe there will be a day when consumers recognize the quality of the base malts. By the way, I think that the quality of local malts—Rustic Brew Farm’s, for example—is much higher than that of local hops.”

Find additional information about Rustic Brew Farm at rusticbrewfarm.com and about Origin Malt at originmalt.com.

Carving out a name for himself

At Rock Dove Farm, Todd Schriver turns salvaged trees into striking bowls, platters and furniture

By Nancy McKibben | Photography by Rachel Joy Barehl

Most of us look at an oak and see a tree. “When I see a tree,” says 41-year-old salad farmer Todd Schriver, “I see where the different bowls are and what they look like.”

Since 2018, Todd been carving wooden bowls made from “dead, dying or dangerous trees”—dangerous trees drop limbs—and selling them at the Worthington and Clintonville farmers markets.

While he continues to sell tomatoes, cucumbers and greens, his bowls have become a welcome hedge against the pandemic’s disruption in produce sales to restaurants. Photographer Rachel Joy Barehl and I visited his West Jefferson farm to see Todd in action.

Farming and carving

Todd grew up on his dad’s farm in Bluffton, Indiana, grew hay with his brother to pay for college tuition and started Wayward Seed Farm with Adam Welley in 2006. In 2010, he married wife, Heather, a physical therapist, and bought 23.5 acres in West Jefferson, selling 3.5 acres to Kate Hodges of Foraged & Sown organic produce, and dubbing the rest of the property Rock Dove Farm.

Already a hobby furniture maker, Todd was prompted to start making bowls by the availability of ash wood that resulted from the emerald ash borer infestation.

“Taking wood to a mill and milling it into boards is expensive,” he explains. “And it takes a long time to dry when it’s thick—a piece 12 inches thick might take 18 years to dry.” But a wooden bowl? “You can shape a bowl wet and then dry it. If it’s 3/8 of an inch thick, it can be dry in 45 days.”

His first try at a bowl took two days, and was “an ugly little thing.” But he persevered, and his bowls are now beautiful and sought-after and much more quickly created.

Power carving

Do not picture Todd chipping away at a large piece of wood with a small knife. He is a power carver, a job that requires power tools and protective gear and generates noise and sawdust in abundance. His workshop is a no-frills standalone built of recycled windows, doors and scrap lumber, filled with the tools of his trade and a huge pile of logs.

Todd first gives us a primer on wood. “Trees are 30 to 45% water, a bundle of straws that shrink as they dry. If the ends dry faster than the middle, then the wood can crack and split.”

Some splits Todd can incorporate into the design, filling the crack with colored resin, but because the wood dries radially, bowls become longer and narrower and distort in shape. Bark—desirable for the “live edge” that customers like—can pop off.

To counter these problems, Todd carves green wood into roughly the finished shape, then packs the damp sawdust into the bowl’s interior to encourage it to dry slowly. It goes into a labeled paper grocery bag and Todd checks its moisture content periodically, finishing the bowl after it dries.

White oak is “the hardest to carve, but the most beautiful when it’s done.” Todd also favors black walnut, ash, maple, honey locust, sweet gum, burr oak, box elder, holly, birdseye maple, and cherry. But not mulberry or osage wood: “Too abrasive—they dull my tools.” From branch to bowl

To make a bowl, Todd first saws a log in half using a band saw, then cuts vertical slices called blanks into rough bowl shapes. For a live edge, the bark-covered side is ground away to make the inside of the bowl, leaving a bark-covered lip.

His tool of choice for power carving is the angle grinder, which is akin to a small, hand-held chainsaw. “These tools are really dangerous,” Todd says, citing several stomach-turning examples of angle grinders run amok. But he has become an expert.

“From log to unsanded blank, I can do 10 a day.” The carving takes an hour or less. A truckload of wood lasts a month.

Todd dons earplugs, as do we, then adds a respirator and gloves. He bends over the jawhorse (a steel sawhorse with a vise) where he has clamped the blank, and begins shaping the outside of the bowl with the angle grinder. We are happy to have the earplugs.

Sawdust flies like snow, settling on Todd’s arms, his jeans, his shirt and drifting gently over every item in his workshop. Although he sweeps up two garbage cans of sawdust daily, to be later composted for his vegetable garden, the shop is impossibly dusty. Even Reggie the dog sports sawdust accents on his black coat.

To carve out the inside of the bowl, Todd first marks the carving depth by drilling two holes into the bark with a radial drill press. Again, sawdust flies as he uses progressively finer-toothed grinders to grind away most of the bark and the bowl’s inside. The roughly carved end product is then packed with sawdust, bagged and shelved to dry for 45 to 60 days.

The penultimate step, sanding, “is a tremendously difficult thing to do well” mostly because it is time-consuming, requiring an hour or more of work, first with a three-inch disc sander, then by hand.

Finally, Todd finishes the bowl with mineral oil and local beeswax “from Isaac Barnes at Honeyrun Farm,” another market vendor.

A bowl market

Today Todd sells largely from inventory, while also doing custom work—for example, a 40-inch sink basin made of white oak, then heavily epoxied to be waterproof, and a live-edge black walnut coffee table.

Todd also sells online and, surprisingly, on Twitter. “I post about four pictures showing the story of a particular bowl. I think people enjoy seeing something positive on Twitter.”

The uncarved blank. Carving the outside of the bowl.

Carving the inside of the bowl. The roughly carved bowl.

A large black walnut bowl. The ripples in the grain are a result of movement between branch and tree trunk.

With two sons—Henry, 2, and George, 4—as well as a 14-year-old foster son, a farm employee and Reggie the dog for Todd and his wife to support, Todd is always looking for ways to improve his bottom line. Recent innovations include microwave drying for smaller bowls and a magnetic live-edge wooden knife strip.

Todd continues to refine his craft, but plans to keep growing his salad vegetables, too. “I like doing both. Four hours a day in the garden, five in the shop.” And, he adds, with three boys at home, “My most important job is being a dad.”

Find Todd’s bowls at the Rock Dove Farm stall at the Worthington and Clintonville farmers markets. Contact Todd at 614-738-1050; farmer@rockdovevegetables.com.

Nancy McKibben is happy to combine her loves of eating and writing with the opportunity to advocate for sustainable agriculture in the pages of Edible Columbus. Her latest project is Yucatecan Lullaby, a bilingual (English and Spanish) children’s picture book. She is also a novelist, poet and lyricist, the mother of six and wife of one. View her work at nancymckibben.com; contact her at nmckibben@leader.com.