From Grain to Glass:

How Cold Stream Malt & LINC Malt are Revolutionizing Craft Brewing in Washington

BY JEFF FIJOLEK

August on the Palouse means harvest season. Wheat planted the prior fall sat dormant through winter, soaking up as much water and nutrients from the loess during the spring and summer months. There’s spring wheat, too, planted after the snow and frost begin to melt, along with short-season grains like barley and pulses, including lentils and chickpeas.

This area of Eastern Washington and North Idaho started its transformation close to 15,000 years ago when an ice dam on Glacial Lake Missoula gave way, pouring a wave of water across the region, cutting the Channeled Scablands and Columbia Gorge and carrying with it a layer of loose, silty dirt and sediment. Over the following millennia, this fine loess was picked up by winds and deposited on these undulating hills to the south, a fertile layer of clay that becomes blanketed by a patchwork of greens, yellows and browns sewn together across the landscape, changing shades as the sun crosses each day and over the course of the summer.

The Palouse is home to some of the steepest farmland on earth. Summer temperatures regularly exceed 100F. Annual rainfall sits in the high teens, about half of the national average. The clay-like soil here isn’t suited to growing apples, cherries or hops, agricultural tentpoles for the state of Washington.

This is dryland farming, and ever since European immigrants settled here in the late 19th Century, the Palouse has become known as a world leader in the production of grains, cereals, legumes and pulses in terms of both quality and yield.