Barossa Valley winemaker launches beer line inspired by terroir

Acclaimed winemaker Ben Radford has introduced a new and surprising line-up of sparklings at a historic vineyard in South Australia's Barossa Valley.

The bottles look at home among his cellar door wines, but when the cork pops, what pours out is actually beer.

"What we've done is picked the most extreme soil types and climates and made an ale from each of those sub-regions in the Barossa," he said.

If the process sounds familiar it is, at least in the wine industry.

"I've got a really good understanding of grapes [and] what flavours you get from different terroirs within the Barossa," he said.

"And I went, imagine if we could show that with grain."

The hobby that became a malt house

That seed was planted after a conversation with the operators of Malt Donkey, a new malt house in the Adelaide Hills that started as a home-brewing hobby.

Mr Michell's family owns a major wool processor, Michell Wool.

His grandfather was also one of the pioneers of barley and wheat breeding in Australia.

When Mr Michell stopped running the wool business 12 years ago, he set out to take barley from functional commodity to beer's flavour-carrying hero.

"People have been growing barley for years based on yield, yield from the paddock, yield in the malt house, we're looking for flavour," Mr Michell said.

"We managed to beg, borrow and steal 30 to 40 different grains, some of them hadn't been planted commercially for decades."

Turning curiosity into a company

Mr Michell's hobby became a commercial venture after years of research, field trials and brewing experiments.

"We started doing some really good stuff and I had a choice not to do it anymore because we'd come to the end of the small scale or go to the next level," he said.

The next level is a state-of-the-art boutique malt house in an old apple packing facility at Ashton in the Adelaide Hills.

While it's small compared to the massive malt houses of Australia's brewing industry, it's no backyard business.

"We have all the capabilities of the very large systems … to make top-shelf malt, but just condensed down to a very small system," maltster Sam Barlow said.

Finding farmers to grow the barley and keep it isolated from other crops raised some eyebrows.

"They operate in hundreds and thousands of tonnes and we're like, 'Cool, we're looking for 10 tonnes,'" Mr Barlow said.

The company also leases part of a vineyard in South Australia's McLaren Vale, where owner Oli Madgett grows the barley between rows of wine grapes.

"With a bit of a downturn in the wine industry, we wanted to actually optimise the usage of the whole of our block," he said.

"So now we can grow barley and grow with the other two-thirds."

From malting to brewing

Malt Donkey's initial aim was just to make the malt and supply other breweries, but with no existing market, it went into brewing instead.

Tom Whitehouse, who became Malt Donkey's brewer, spent years at some of Australia's best-known craft breweries where hops are the hero.

"At first I didn't believe it because it was a bit of a mystery and I was like what, malt's just a commodity," he said.

To make barley the star, Tom Whitehouse brews each beer using the same recipe, changing only the grain.

"I was nervous that all the beers we made would taste the same," he said.

"But when we brewed from five different sites in the first harvest, they all tasted different and now we're getting similar results with barley from the second harvest."

He took the same approach with Ben Radford's Barossa Valley ales, recently launched to the hospitality industry after an initial private tasting.

"I had that epiphany moment where I sat down nice and quietly in the cottage after they'd all been bottled, lined them up and went through," Mr Radford said.

"They are so different.

From the elegant packaging to the specific provenance story, the barley first ale is positioned as an alternative to wine, to be paired with food and shared on special occasions.

But with alcohol consumption declining, tight disposable incomes and beer's identity already established, the test is whether Malt Donkey's attempt to create a new "fine ale" category can break through.

"[That's] as big a challenge as it has been to create the thing in the first place," Mr Michell said.

"And I'd love us to then create the demand for people to make better beers, better ales because they can."