{"id":762447,"date":"2026-06-26T22:13:29","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T22:13:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/762447\/"},"modified":"2026-06-26T22:13:29","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T22:13:29","slug":"beer-follows-wine-industrys-lead-with-terroir-driven-ales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/762447\/","title":{"rendered":"Beer follows wine industry’s lead with terroir-driven ales"},"content":{"rendered":"

Acclaimed winemaker Ben Radford has introduced a new and surprising line-up of sparklings at a historic vineyard in South Australia’s Barossa Valley.<\/p>\n

The bottles look at home among his cellar door wines, but when the cork pops, what pours out is actually beer.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Ben Radford is growing barley as well as wine grapes on his Barossa property. (ABC Landline: Tony Hill)<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n

If the process sounds familiar it is, at least in the wine industry.<\/p>\n

“I’ve got a really good understanding of grapes [and] what flavours you get from different terroirs within the Barossa,” he said.<\/p>\n

“And I went, imagine if we could show that with grain.”<\/p>\n

The hobby that became a malt house<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“It was never a business, it was a passion project that’s gone out of control,” founder Peter Michell said.<\/p>\n

Mr Michell’s family owns a major wool processor, Michell Wool.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Peter Michell’s homebrewing hobby has taken on a life of its own. (ABC Landline: Kerry Staight)<\/p>\n

His grandfather was also one of the pioneers of barley and wheat breeding in Australia.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Ben Radford has released his first single-origin ales. (ABC Landline: Tony Hill)<\/p>\n

“We didn’t know whether it was land, whether it was climate, whether it was variety, so we had to try it all.<\/p>\n

“We managed to beg, borrow and steal 30 to 40 different grains, some of them hadn’t been planted commercially for decades.”<\/p>\n

Turning curiosity into a company<\/p>\n

Mr Michell’s hobby became a commercial venture after years of research, field trials and brewing experiments.<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n

\"Distilling<\/p>\n

The Ashton malt house has state-of-the-art mini malting drums from Germany. (ABC Landline: Simon Goodes)<\/p>\n

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

While it’s small compared to the massive malt houses of Australia’s brewing industry, it’s no backyard business.<\/p>\n

“We have all the capabilities of the very large systems \u2026 to make top-shelf malt, but just condensed down to a very small system,” maltster Sam Barlow said.<\/p>\n

Finding farmers to grow the barley and keep it isolated from other crops raised some eyebrows.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Sam Barlow runs the unusual malting operation. (ABC Landline: Simon Goodes)<\/p>\n

“They operate in hundreds and thousands of tonnes and we’re like, ‘Cool, we’re looking for 10 tonnes,'” Mr Barlow said.<\/p>\n

“So the scale they sort of giggle at, but then we talk about paying a massive premium for the barley and they stop giggling at that point.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Oli Madgett grows brewing barley between his rows of wine grapes. (ABC Landline: Kerry Staight)<\/p>\n

“When we’ve got vines, we’re actually only using about a third of the footprint of the block.”<\/p>\n

“So now we can grow barley and grow with the other two-thirds.”<\/p>\n

From malting to brewing<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Tom Whitehouse, who became Malt Donkey’s brewer, spent years at some of Australia’s best-known craft breweries where hops are the hero.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Tom Whitehouse’s job is to make the barley shine. (ABC Landline: Tony Hill)<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n

“But I guess the curiosity got to me and I just decided, ‘Let’s give it a shot and see what we can do.'”<\/p>\n

To make barley the star, Tom Whitehouse brews each beer using the same recipe, changing only the grain.<\/p>\n

“I was nervous that all the beers we made would taste the same,” he said.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n

He took the same approach with Ben Radford’s Barossa Valley ales, recently launched to the hospitality industry after an initial private tasting.<\/p>\n

\"Aerial<\/p>\n

Ben Radford is growing barley as well as wine grapes on his Barossa property. (ABC Landline: Simon Goodes)<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n

“They are so different.<\/p>\n

“Wine has always been amazing as far as different flavours from different sites, but I had no idea that grain had all these flavours locked within it.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"Barley<\/p>\n

The idea is to take barley from commodity to flavour-carrying hero. (ABC Landline: Simon Goodes)<\/p>\n

“[That’s] as big a challenge as it has been to create the thing in the first place,” Mr Michell said.<\/p>\n

“I think it will be viable, but it will be viable in a boutique way, just like a boutique winery will be.<\/p>\n

“And I’d love us to then create the demand for people to make better beers, better ales because they can.”<\/p>\n

Watch ABC TV’s Landline at 12:30pm AEST on Sunday or stream anytime on ABC iview<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Acclaimed winemaker Ben Radford has introduced a new and surprising line-up of sparklings at a historic vineyard in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":762448,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[154158,64,63,363785,63322,164980,33773,363780,244087,99,243231,363778,77403,363776,363777,363784,289435,363781,363782,1124,363779,363783],"class_list":["post-762447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-adelaide-hills","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-barley","tag-barley","tag-barossa-valley","tag-beer","tag-ben-radford","tag-brewing","tag-business","tag-craft-beer","tag-fine-ale","tag-grain","tag-malt","tag-malt-donkey","tag-malt-house","tag-mclaren-vale","tag-peter-michell","tag-sam-barlow","tag-south-australia","tag-terroir","tag-tom-whitehouse"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=762447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762447\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/762448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=762447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=762447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=762447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}