Chevallier Malt

Oh, wow!

That’s become the usual response from people trying a beer brewed with Chevallier malt. Wow. And it’s renewing an interest in the many wonderful flavours of malt at a time when hops are getting most of the attention.

Chevallier was the brewing barley of the 19^th century. Found in most pints of beer, it gave a defining flavour to Victorian Era British ales. It was renowned for its rich maltiness, a pleasant fullness of body, and a slight marmalade fruitiness, which was the perfect base for popular India Pale Ales and Porters.

The story of how Chevallier came to exist starts with labourer John Andrews. He’d been threshing barley all day and returned home feeling some discomfort in his shoe. This turned out to be an ear of particularly fine barley. He planted it in the garden of his landlord-employer, the amateur agriculturalist Reverend Dr John Chevallier of Aspall Hall, Suffolk.

The barley grew magnificently, and so Dr Chevallier started to propagate more and more of it, and it became commercially available by the early 1830s. Within a few decades it accounted for the majority of all brewing barley in Britain. The word spread to other countries too. Its popularity meant it grew in almost every European country, as well as North and South America, Australia and New Zealand. Given the global dominance of Chevallier, it made it the barley that Fred and George Smith––the founders of what became Crisp Malt––malted from 1870.

With the success, came the fall – literally

Though Chevallier gave brewers a distinctive flavour, it ultimately became a challenging barley for growers. The crop was susceptible to falling under its own weight, or to wind damage.

As plant breeding became better understood in the early 20^th century, malting barley varieties such as Plumage Archer were developed and took over Chevallier with better agronomics and yields. This combined with changing tastes in beer towards lighter and hoppier ales, made the grain which once had dominated British beer for 100 years, redundant from the fields from the 1930s.

The nature of plant breeding is to always be looking for better varieties, sometimes for flavour but mostly for agronomics; the barley had to grow well and give good and reliable yields, and with flavour less important as the beer industry at the time, there was a shift away from characterful beers.

That’s changing now, of course, with the remarkable growth of craft beer and the never-ending search for more flavour and new flavour, and all of this made the reintroduction of Chevallier possible.

Fast forward to early 2000’s

The John Innes Centre in Norwich has a vast collection of barley seeds, an archive of sorts, a historic database which can be explored for various uses: breeding, research, or, in the case of Chevallier, to see if it had a place in modern brewing.

Dr Chris Ridout, from The John Innes Centre, alongside New Heritage Barley planted some Chevallier seed and assessed to see if it’s a barley that might be resistant to the plant disease Fusarium head blight (while also wondering what those old Victorian ales might have tasted like). The initial results were very promising. The grain grew well and so more seeds were planted in subsequent years.

A crop was harvested and floor malted at Crisp, which provided some challenges for the experienced maltsters to understand how this heritage barley behaved. The malt was then used in small brewing trials, where the results gave a beer with a richness of flavour not found in modern barley varieties, and exciting layers of malt flavour––it was a delight to rediscover it.

It also revealed more about this barley than was previously known, as beer historian Martyn Cornell documents in this blog. Chevallier had more protein and left a higher final gravity than originally thought, meaning older beer styles may have been weaker in alcohol and with a fuller body than historians believed.

The initial brewing trials showed that more hops were needed to balance the malt flavour, while giving the beer a longer maturation also helped to create a finer flavour. As Cornell suggests, those qualities didn’t necessarily suit the shifting taste towards Bitters and Milds, which hastened the increasing popularity of Plumage Archer, its ultimate successor in early 20^th century ales. But those flavours and qualities can certainly work with modern craft beers styles as well as historic beer styles.