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BY JENNY LAVEY 23 farm406 Malt Quality Lab Provides Upscale Analysis for Craft Beer and Food Industries ontana State University is now home to Montana's first public Malt Quality Lab, the only lab of its kind in the Northern Great Plains region that can provide a complete quality analysis of barley malt used in craft brewing, human and animal food industries. MSU MSU M The lab is funded largely in thanks to Montana's wheat and barley farmers through check-off funds, voluntary funds charged at point of sale used to fund research and development with the Montana Wheat and Barley Committee, and with additional support from the National Brewers Association and the Montana Agricultural Experiment Station. Outfitted with state-of-the-art equipment that includes a densitometer and Gallery analyzer -- instruments that can determine the overall quality, enzyme potential, starch availability and protein content of barley malt, the lab serves a unique purpose for one of Montana's cornerstone agricultural industries. The establishment of the lab means that the MSU Barley Breeding Program can process data points of malt barley six times faster than using a national lab, the closest of which is 2,000 miles away in Wisconsin, according to Jamie Sherman, MSU barley breeder and assistant professor of plant sciences Jamie Sherman examines a sample of hull-less barley. Sherman recently received a $300,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture to research barley varieties grown in Montana. (MSU Photo by Adrian Sanchez-Gonzalez)

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