Six Row Winter Barley
Barley was deemed by early Americans a humble grain when compared with its cousin, wheat. Wheat milled into fine white flour. Barley flour and barley meal was tan. Rye would grow on the worst soils. Barley would grow on middling soils. Wheat was finicky and often required loamy soils or bottom lands to thrive. While barley bread was only cherished by some Scots and literate Christians who knew that barley bread was what Jesus broke at the last supper, malted barley had many devotees. Beer was everywhere. So was whiskey.
Barley was also much favored for feed, particularly as finishing feed for hogs during the final month before slaughter.
The barley variety first named in early American records was “bere”—a six row blonde long awned variety of Hordeum vulgare with a short growing season and a tolerance to soils with low Ph. It was suited to the northern parts of Scotland and was planted in Spring for harvest in September.
Beremeal was considered the sine qua non for the signature scottish bread, the bannock, and was used in distilling in the islands, which resisted the move toward the more controllable two row barley in the 20th century.
In the Orkney Islands Bere Barley was Spring planted for late summer or fall harvest. But its extraordinary cold tolerance caused farmers in England to attempt it as a winter grain in the latter half of the 18th century. These experiments were noted in colonial Virginia. Southerners began imitating the practices of the English cultivators, planting it in September for harvest in early June.
For much of the 19th century various strains of yellow six row barley were mass selected to make it suited to winter conditions (and less sunlight) at various locales throughout the South. There were other kinds of barley being cultivated (the 1820s to 1880s were an age of experimental farming), so you had growers of two row, various colored barleys (Tennessee Winter could manifest blue kernels as well as the standard white), Spring barleys (rarely successful in the region), and hooded barley, but “Winter Barley” became the classic landrace of the region, valued particularly for forage, for milling, and in certain select strains, for malting. While English growers tended to prefer two row barleys for malting, Americans bred six row winter barley strains for that purpose, seeking ‘mellowness of flavor’ and later a particular low protein profile. Among the favored modern bred malting varieties, four are winter six rows: Charles, Endeavor, Wintmalt, and Thoroughbred.
[The industrial normalization of distilling has lead to a decided preference for two row strains such as Violetta that have low protein, mealy consistency, and a quick uptake of water during steeping, a requisite for quick germination. “Six-row barleys have four of the corns from any set of six slightly thinner than the other two; the smaller corns are also twisted as they grow from their position on the rachis. This diversity of corn size makes six-row barley less attractive to brewers for two main reasons: the small corns have a lower starch content and higher protein content (and hence lower alcohol potential), and the mills in the brewhouse are most easily set to produce an optimum grist when the malt corns are even in size.” https://beerandbrewing.com/dictionary/XT8OHss68N/]
These concerns did not greatly matter in the pre-industrial era of brewing and distilling in America when six row winter barley was employed in distilling, brewing, livestock feed, and in baking.
In the 1890s the Tennessee Agricultural Experiment Station began collecting strains of six row winter barley from around the South. Many of these appeared to be locally adapted minimally improved landraces from several growing regions. The breeders crossed and selected these strains and in 1900 released Tennessee Winter Barley, a select cultivar that would become the dominant winter barley in agriculture for the first half of the twentieth century.
Here is a note from a 1910 pamphlet [USDA Farmer's Bulletin 518, author: H. B. Deer, 1912 entitled Winter Barley: "The most popular variety of winter barley is the Tennessee Winter, the heads and grains of which are shown in figure 1 (see attached pic). This is a six-rowed bearded variety, with yellowish white beards and heads, which has been grown in the Atlantic Coast States since the early colonists introduced it. No effort was made to improve it until in 1900, when the Tennessee Agricultural Experiment Station began breeding it and gave it the name 'Tennessee Winter.' When geneticists began examining the antecedence of this colonial-era barley, they identified the Balkan-Caucasus region as the likely area of origin. In Ewert Aberg’s classic USDA Classification of the Barley Varieties Grown in the United States and Canada (1945) the following reflection on the role of natural selection in the shaping of the landrace appears: “It is not known how many introductions of winter barley were made in the early history of this crop. There is evidence, however, that much of the barley of that [colonial & early 19th century] period was a mixture of an indefinite number of strains, a condition that even today is found occasionally. In these mixed fields natural selection played its role, shaping the type to suit a particular set of conditions . . . . the surviving plants of a severe winter were saved and tested for their usefulness.”
The USDA small grains depository contains many lines of Tennessee Winter wheat, since various lines adapted to different regions and growing conditionsin the United States. It retains the original Tennesee Experimental Station Release—a 1903 accession with the PI 11193. https://npgsweb.ars-grin.gov/gringlobal/accessiondetail.aspx?1055089 I have included the USDA’s recent image of the kernels of this variety below. There are at least 10 other lines of TN winter in the collection as well as a dozen varieties hybridized from it.
If one wishes to taste the traditional barley of the South—Tennessee Winter Barley is what you should seek or grow.