Australia: Two new barley varieties accredited as malting types

Two new barley varieties have passed the necessary evaluations and have successfully been accredited as malting types, the Farm Weekly reported on March 11.

Bottler and Kiwi were submitted by GrainSearch and Malteurop Australia respectively.

Both varieties were accredited as malting barley following the evaluation trials conducted in association with the Malting and Brewing Industry Barley Technical Committee (MBIBTC) assessment, under the Barley Australia malting barley evaluation process.

Bottler is a medium rainfall, mid-season maturity variety with high fermentability that is well suited to the export market.

It is suited to environments where RGT Planet and Westminster are grown.

Kiwi is a high rainfall variety and while it was submitted as a medium fermentability variety, its performance appears to be best suited to the high fermentability category and is therefore well suited to both domestic and export markets.

Kiwi is intended to be grown largely in Victoria in the same environments as Westminster and Fairview.

The Barley Australia malting barley evaluation and accreditation process is recognised as the required standard for the determination of malting barley for all new Australian malting barley varieties.

It will continue to assist market adoption of these newly-accredited varieties through its new program of post accreditation support, which is currently under development.

In other updates from the evaluation process, both Buff and Laperouse had insufficient grain available to complete full evaluation in 2021 and will now continue stage two evaluation in 2022.

Commodus CL, Beast, Cyclops and IGB1825 all had parcels of grain pilot malted, as planned, to satisfy the requirements for stage one and can now proceed into stage two commercial evaluation trials.

Both Beast and Cyclops have insufficient quantities of grain available, so evaluation will continue in 2023, IGB1825 will continue in 2024 and Commodus will continue the process this year.

Further evaluation of Minotaur and AGTB0043 in stage one has been carried over into 2022.

Barley Australia has also accepted applications for three new varieties for malting barley evaluation.

IGB20125T from InterGrain, and AGTB0244 and AGTB0318 from Australian Grain Technologies (AGT) have been accepted into stage zero.

IGB20125T is another addition to the suite of imidazolinone barley varieties available to growers.

This variety is suited to higher rainfall environments and has an RGT Planet adaptation.

AGTB0244 and AGTB0318 are both suited to medium to high rainfall environments and have a non-glycosidic nitrile (GN) trait that may be of interest to the distilling sector.

Sufficient grain parcels of all three varieties are available for commencement of stage one evaluation in 2022, subject to final quality checks, and will be confirmed when final programming for the year is completed in the coming weeks.

11 March, 2022