Scottish Cereals | Barley

The main cereal grown in Scotland is barley and this important commercial crop with its characteristic ‘beard’ is concentrated on the east of the country where the most fertile land is found. Scotland grows more than a quarter of the UK’s total barley crop and the cereal is used for making whisky and ale as well as for animal feed.

There are two main types:

- Winter barley is sown in the autumn and harvested in July /August the following year. It is used mainly as animal feed and the straw provides animal bedding.

- Spring barley is sown in March or April and harvested about four months later. The best quality spring barley is used for malting barley, one of the main ingredients in producing the finest quality Scotch whisky, while poorer crops are used as animal feed.

There are also two different forms of barley:
- Two row, which is by far the most common that has opposed pairs of grains making up the ear.
- Six row, used mainly for feed that has the grains in opposed sets of three but is much less common.

Scots Bere is a six-row barley which is susceptible to frost, but grows very quickly, particularly during long summer days like they have in the north of Scotland. Due to its rapid growth it is sown late, but is often the first to be harvested and is known as the ‘90-day’ barley. You don’t have to be a Countdown expert to swap the letters of bere around to indicate one of the products this barley is used for – and it can also be milled to make traditional ‘bannocks’, a type of unleavened bread once baked on girdles. The only bannocks made of barley now however are Orkney beremeal bannocks, though they also contain more modern raising agents.

Over half of Scotland’s spring barley production is used in the whisky industry. If barley is wetted in a container or special floor and stirred up it will germinate. This in turn converts the starch to sugar, an ancient process called malting used to make whisky and beers. Dark beers are produced from malt which has been heated so much that it has almost burnt, hence the black colour.

Barley can also be used in soups such as Scotch broth or for other traditional recipes such as Barley Pudding, when it is boiled with currants, raisins and water and served with sugar and cream.