How good is Belarusian malt for our beer?

Today, we still drink beer made from the old malt stocks. Very soon though, the Belarusian breweries will have to make beer from the Belarusian barley only in order to obey the presidential decree. The European Radio for Belarus explores what quality the “new” Belarusian beer will obtain, after the president has banned brewers from buying foreign malt. It turns out that both the quality and the cost are likely to change.

“The situation with the quality of malt has not been good over the past two years. This will also affect the cost price. At least, this is better than putting production to a halt. We have to buy barley which is grown in Belarus. It is often not of the first grade. Generally, there is very little first-grade barley in Belarus. If I am not mistaken, we have just several percent of high-quality barley grown in this country,” says Mikalay Dudko, CEO Alivaryia Breweries.

According to Mikalay Dudko, it is more costly to process the low-quality malt.

“If there is no high-quality barley, you need to process what you have. This is of course harder. The cost price of beer turns out to be higher. You need to get out of this situation somehow in order to make a quality that could more or less meet the market demand,” he adds.

Valiantsina Bagravets, the chief technologist at the Lida Breweries, prefers the Russia-made malt.

“The Russian malt is better than the Belarusian one in terms of quality and protein level. Under the procedure, malt must contain less than 11 percent of protein. This year, we have more than 12 percent,” she says.

Last week, Syabar Breweries made a public complaint about the quality of the Belarusian malt. ERB called Siargei Stryzhakou, Syabar Breweries spokesman who today is happy only with the fact that the Belarusian malt is not more expensive than imported grades.

“Definitely, we have complaints about this malt in terms of quality. Price-wise, we are satisfied that this malt is not more expensive than the one from abroad. Anyway, we will not be allowed to buy imported malt,” he said.

Yet, the Ukrainian malt that Syabar used to buy before was cheaper.

“We were allowed to buy it in summer. We used to import the Ukrainian malt. The cost was slightly less than currently at the Belsolad (the Belarusian state-run malt seller),” Stryzhakou said.

In respond to the question whether Syabar would like to buy foreign barley, the question was not very optimistic.

“Even if we want to buy foreign barley, we can’t. This is prohibited by law. We will try to make an acceptable product from what we have available,” Skryzhakou said.

Photo: http://beerbook.ru/