- Pennsylvania used to be known as one of the bread basket colonies.

With richer and more fertile soil to that in the North, the farms in this part of the country were in charge of the majority of grain production and exportation in colonial America.

At the turn of the 20th century, there were still hundreds of active flour mills in Pennsylvania but that number has continued to steadily decline.

With the push of urbanization and industrial farming, grain production and processing is nowhere near as ubiquitous in Pennsylvania, as it used to be.

And much of the knowledge about growing and using a diverse variety of grain crops, now known as ancient grains, has been lost.

The Grain Chain will focus on the three important stages of grain production.

The grower, the baker, and the maltster who all play an integral part in our local food system.

We'll visit the family owned organic grain farm Small Valley Milling, committed to growing a variety of ancient grains that once thrived in our region.

Then we meet Mark Brault from Deer Creek Malt House, the first high quality malt producer in Pennsylvania since prohibition.

But first we hear from Alex Bois, a scientist turned Baker, who is determined to bring back a variety of healthy and delicious baked goods from Lost Bread Company.

(gentle music) - In the 20th century bread really became a factory product.

The health qualities, the keeping properties, all of these things that were radically changed by industrialization.

By the domination of white flour, we became used to eating breads that have basically everything good for you.

Everything that we kind of evolved to rely on from a dietary perspective, stripped away from them.

Not only is there more nutrition in the whole grains that we're using but there's also more flavor.

The knowledge about how to work with them has been quickly lost over the span of the last century.

- This is the buckwheat honey rye dough, it's a hundred percent rye.

We already mixed the dough with the rye, the starter, the honey, we let it rest and now we're shaping it.

We're rolling these in buckwheat groats.

This helps it not stick to the basket.

And it's just like a nice texture.

(gentle music) - In 2017, I opened Lost Bread with FCM Hospitality, with the goal of making baked goods and other foods with locally sourced whole grains that were not only healthier but also tastier, more delicious, more appealing because of that, without making the product so expensive that people couldn't afford it.

For us, operating a larger scale bakery was really the only way to make the financial side work to be able not only sell our bread for an accessible price but also to pay our employees a living wage.

We're in a Craft Hall right here which is on Delaware Avenue, right on the banks of the Delaware, working right next to Mainstay Independent Brewery and then Craft Hall Kitchen, which is the restaurant and the bar that we're sitting in right now.

Our main workspace is on display to the patrons of the restaurant, which is really nice because you get to see your bread being made.

That tells you a lot about what the kind of product it is, instead of being dumped out by a machine in the factory.

In early 2020 we decided to stop using any and all white flour, which means that all of the flour that we use in the bakery we're milling ourselves on this mill here and it's coming from grain sourced from the area.

Our whole bakery is set up so that we can learn more about what grains work best in each product so we can get to know kind of each grain, get to know its quacks.

So we do the grain chair every month where we focus on a different grain and then we bake with it, we research it, we read about it, we end up with all sorts of products, some of which are horrible and should never see the light of day.

Others are so good that they make their way into our regular production.

But in doing that, we learned how to mill the grain.

We learn what it's good for.

We learn about, you know, what it likes and doesn't like and we end up really learning in general that from all the grain that can and should be grown in this area, that's good, you can make just about anything.

- What I really love is how much room for experiment there is in this place.

And grain chair is a great example of that because every month we have a different grain we just have a meeting and we decide which grain it is and then we start thinking about stuff that we can make specifically using that one grain.

(gentle music) - [Female speaker] We made a sourdough rye brownie.

It doesn't have any flour in it, all the flour that is there is just pre-fermented in the actual starter.

And there is a rye whiskey caramel that I use rye whiskey for, and then we have a rye pistachio streusel.

- [Bois] For us, finding a way to get together and develop products together every month, there's a lot of feedback and discussion.

We're all working to not only get our creativity out but also to improve.

- [Man] We're gonna be making this cake every day.

- Forever.

(applause) - Yummy.

- Next.

- Mushroom miso practice.

This one is the same dough that I did before, but I didn't use butter, I used oil.

- [Female speaker] And what kind of mushrooms did you end up using?

- I think I'm gonna use like (indistinct).

- The recipe is so flexible though, that you can like work with whatever mushrooms you got.

As the bakers are busy developing their interesting products, I'm busy putting together a little Zin, which is information about the grain that helps people understand the bigger picture of how this was relevant to our cultural history and our cuisines around the world.

And also who else is using it locally in our community, where they can purchase it locally, what they can purchase from us and also tips and recipes for how they can use it in their kitchen.

To show you some of the ones that we've done so far.

So we've done pine corn, honey corn.

We love puns.

You spelt it, you dealt it.

For spelt, we get our spelt flour from a grower in Halifax PA, Small Valley Milling.

For that particular Zin I'll interview them and talk about like why they started growing spelt and how they're adapting to climate change with that particular grain.

In doing research each month, I realized how little I know about each of these grains and how much context I need to understand in order to set this up for our customers so they really can grasp like what these grains are and the importance that they've had to our culture and to our cuisine.

The farmer's role is to weather the climate change and to figure out what will work and then we really have a responsibility to turn that into food that feeds people and that sells.

Grain is a really high return on investment in your land.

It's been the backbone of regional agriculture in this area in the past and needs to be a big part of it again in the future.

- I was raised on a farm about three miles from here.

My parents had a dairy farm.

We got married in '74 and bought our first farm '75, had three children.

And then we added a second farm in '96 and that's the farm that we're currently sitting on here today and kind of gotten involved in organics in '99.

I'll back up a little bit.

I was graduated from Penn state and I went into business for myself and I was selling buildings and grain bins.

I just happened to run into her dad and that's when I met her and the rest is history and we've been farming ever since.

- I went to school for AG engineering at Penn State, graduated from there and went to work at Case New Holland as a engineer down there for seven years.

I always wanted to return to the farm at some point, just raise a family here like I was raised, I guess, and give them the same opportunities that I had growing up in the country and being able to experience doing things with your hands and learning things at an early age.

Land is that expensive to buy, you almost have to build it over a series of years.

You can't just go out and say, I'm gonna start farming and go buy myself 500 acres because the payments would be so high.

You can't pay the interest plus pay the principal and still put enough in your pocket to make a living with all the equipment costs and all the machinery you need.

It's just too much of a capital investment to start.

If your family was farming and you kind of eased into it, that way you have a lot better chance than just saying you wanna be a farmer and go buy everything.

(gentle music) - Look at the beautiful, the leaves are starting to change on the mountain.

You can tell it's autumn and the corn's starting to dry down and behind you, you have beautiful clover.

The bees like that, it's what they make honey out of.

You hear clover honey, that's what they do.

Well, this is about the middle of the two farms.

The original farm is on the left and on the right is where the mill farm is.

The one farm is 84 acres and the other one's 100 acres and we combine them into strips.

You can see run the whole length of the two farms and what we have a rotation here where we have the corn and when the corn dries down and we harvest that, we'll plough that ground and we'll put spelt in this fall yet.

- There was very few people going food grade spelt and also processing food grade spelt.

So that was one of the reasons why we saw it as a niche market to be able to get in into it and create a little more value here on the farm.

Well, we were conventional.

We were barely making $50 an acre clear and the taxes were more than that.

So I mean, it just, the numbers weren't there and she worked full-time and I'd work full time.

It was an uphill struggle.

- You're getting paid two and a half times usually more for your commodity that you're growing, being organic.

So if land is a limited option, you can generate more revenue off a given piece of land.

- Plus we always raised our own food.

Didn't believe in all the pesticides and herbicides and whatever that everybody's using.

I can still remember they thought I was nuts when I started going organic.

We'd go to these crop meetings and they'd say, what are you doing here?

You are organic.

- I think we believe wholeheartedly in trying to eliminate chemical usage on the food we grow and the food people eat.

And I think that that's one of the biggest pushes that we had to become organic, was to provide healthy and wholesome food for animals and people to eat here.

- Here we have this year's corn crop.

It's drying down.

This corn will be used for corn meal for bakers.

We have distillers that grind this to make whiskey.

So that's a couple of uses, you know, besides the animal feed that this corn go for as organic corn.

Here we have a field of rye that we planted about three weeks ago and you can see the plants are, they're pretty little right now.

This will get probably about four feet high and then we'll combine that and it'll be used for rye flour, rye meal, or the distillers use that.

And then we'll put the straw back in the ground for organic matter.

- [Eric] When we first started, we were selling to other mills.

And then when we started under our own name Small Valley Milling, most of our accounts were bakeries that were looking to source ancient grains at the time.

We say ancient grains here, I mean, there's a lot of them, but the three that we deal with are spelt, emmer and iron corn.

- Here I brought some samples of grain from past years that we harvested.

Here we have wheat that has ons on it.

In my pocket I have emmer, which is an ancient grain.

You can see how small they are.

That's why it's so expensive because the grains are so little compared to the wheat.

And on the other hand, I brought some spelt, which is also in the hull and you can see the difference in the kernel size between these.

- Modern wheat was developed so you run through the field with a machine called a combine harvester and that harvests the grain, cuts it off and also cleans it.

And if you look at the grain that's coming in the combine bin, you can grab a handful of it and eat it or grind it in a home mill and turn it into flour and be ready to bake with it.

With spelt you can't do that.

All those grains, emmer, iron corn and spelt have a husk that tightly holds the kernel and has to be processed or thrashed out to be able to use it.

(machine running) We're in the cleaning house here at Small Valley Milling where the grain is cleaned before it's sent over for further processing, for flour milling or bagging as whole grain kernels.

(machines humming) Here we have some emmer in the hull yet, this is another hull grain that has to be de-hulled before we can process it into flour.

And if we take one of these kernels that's in the hull, we can actually take the two grains out of there.

This is what the de-hulling process would be doing.

Once it's out of there, we have a kernel that looks similar to wheat and we can process that into flour or we can use it as a whole grain.

We can eat it exactly like it is there.

Modern wheat was developed from spelt because people didn't wanna have to deal with that outer husk and this additional process.

Man started looking for another way to make this process easier for us to take it from the field and take it right to the flour mill and mill it instead of having to handle it another time.

But in the process, we lost protection of the grain keeping it fresh and keeping insects off of it and all different reasons that we might've had a whole grain to begin with.

We're here to show you the reduction process that takes whole grain and turns it into two end products white flour and animal feed or the mids that come off.

The roller milling process we're taking the kernel.

We got a lot of intermediate processes till we get to the end.

And these are our end products, white flour and bran.

The white flour is nice light fluffy flour which doesn't have a whole lot of nutrition anymore.

Just carbohydrates and starch.

And bran has all the B vitamins and a lot of the minerals in it.

When you make whole flour, we're retaining all of the nutrition because we're taking the whole kernel and grinding it down into flour and nothing is taken off or extracted.

So as you can see it's a lot more simple process, making whole flour.

You take the whole kernel, it goes to the mill and gets turned into whole flour.

- You know, in the long run, looking back, I think if we would have known what we know now about grains being necessary for you and that sort of thing, we wouldn't have refined our flowers like we have.

Some of these ancient grains were kind of cast by the wayside and people didn't realize their worth and allowed our food systems to decline like they have.

Look, that's what people do every day.

They try to cut corners and, you know, make things easier and less work.

- A lot of farmers do wanna raise nutritious crops that go for food grade drain instead of animal feed.

That's an important part of the whole food economy here locally to have support from the consumer end.

Obviously they're driving everything.

There's reasons that they may want to continue to purchase that and vote with their dollar from the grassroots level saying, I'm willing to purchase this product because that food hasn't had to travel as far, it's fresher, it tastes better.

We're supporting a lot of local organic growers that are family farms.

(gentle music) - We do try to be loyal to our customers as well as to our clients who are growing for us, people that are out there supporting local farmers like ourselves.

(gentle music) - My name is Mark Brault and I'm a founder and maltster at Deer Creek Malt House.

Malt, quite simply is grain that's been modified through the process of germination.

By sprouting the grain, the physical and chemical composition changes in a way that makes it more useful for brewing, for distilling and for certain food applications.

Malting hadn't really been happening in the mid-Atlantic for more than 80 some odd years since prohibition.

When we started production we were an alternative and local source of supply for the many food and beverage artisans in the area who were using malt.

They were just getting it from a commodity suppliers very far outside the region.

They also were getting a lot of ingredients that weren't really developed specifically for a lot of the applications that the craft brewers and artisan bread bakers really needed.

Malting is a very simple, natural process.

There's kind of a mix of art and science that goes into that.

But the base process is very simple, involves steeping grain to start to increase the moisture and rehydrate the grain and start the germination process and then allowing germination to progress in a controlled way.

And you can do that variety of different methods.

One of the oldest is allowing grain to sprout on a concrete slab, which is what we do for a good part of our production.

- [Man] This is two row barley that was grown in Chester County, right nearby, it's germinating on the floor.

And you can see the rootlets that are starting to sprout out of the bottom of the grain.

And that means it's happy and it's full of moisture and it's sprouting along merrily in the room here and we're gonna keep turning the grain every eight or so hours to redistribute moisture and heat.

Make sure it's germinating evenly until it's ready to go on in the kiln.

(gentle music) And then drying the grain to remove the moisture, create a shelf stable product and also create a variety of colors and flavors.

- Once we move from the germination stage where the grains grow and we move into the kiln, where we're drying down the grain and stopping that growing process.

So it's gonna start with a lower temp around 100 degrees and gradually increase as the moisture declines to around 200 degrees Fahrenheit.

- [Brault] One of the areas we really focus on is flavor.

And we do a lot of sensory evaluation usually with a malt tea or a hot steam to extract some of the color and flavor.

And then with a sensory panel, we'll actually taste and try and quantitate some the things that we're tasting.

And that's a really helpful tool for some of the bakers and distillers and brewers who are using those ingredients.

A single variety of barley can be processed a number of different ways to produce different styles of malt.

From a very light grassy, earthy pilsner all the way out to a really dark chocolate malt.

So there's a range of colors and flavors that can be produced from the same input just by processing it differently in the malt house.

Then you layer on top of that using different types of grain.

There's a lot of grain that grows really well in this area.

- Here is a farmer's market setup.

We have baking ingredients, brewing ingredients.

A lot of our products are certified organic and everything is 100% local.

And here I can show at the farmer's market to any person who's home brewing or baking how the actual malted grain looks like.

They can get coarse grind or whole kernel, or have a stone ground flour.

So it's really up to them, but it's kind of fun to be able to show people the result of our work.

(gentle music) - Grain is the bedrock of community and the greater mid-Atlantic grain and malt value chain is a pretty tight group.

We work really closely with Small Valley Milling and share some of the grain that's used to either produce their flour or we germinate and turn into malts.

And we use some of their flour in our baking mixes as well that incorporate a little bit of malt, a little bit of unmalted grain flour and packaged into a pizza mix or pancake mix or bread mix for consumers.

We've done a couple of cool projects recently with Lost Bread Company, where we've actually incorporated some of the bread that is used to bake, that has some of our malt in it and put that bread into some beer and just kind of deconstructed the bread, used the same ingredients as well as some of the loaves of bread in the mash, and then made them a mixed fermented Saison, very rustic beverage incorporating the bread.

(gentle music) We host a annual event called the Philadelphia Grain and Malt Symposium with our partner University of the Sciences that brings hundreds of people from around the region and around the country together to educate and share products made with local grain.

And host fun events like our Fall Harvest Festival, Malt-A-Palooza, that brings people out into the field and helps teach people that some of the things that they eat and drink are truly agricultural products, especially beer which is sometimes taken for granted.

- Another dark lager is coming out so, - Oh, wow.

- Yeah.

- So you'll just keep bringing this stuff.

- Yeah.

- [Brault] For it to work, everyone needs to participate.

The consumer needs to want to have the food or beverage containing those ingredients, whether it's the local element or it's a certain quality attribute or flavor that they're seeking and willing to pay for it 'cause in many cases it costs a little bit more.

The grower needs to be able to grow grain in a way that meets the quality requirements for the miller or the maltster.

In some cases directly the brewer or distiller that they're working with for food and beverages.

Everyone really needs to work together.

If one person decides not to participate or isn't able to fulfill their part in that value chain things break down, whether it's the price or it's the quality or it's the supply, the availability, that local food system or beverage system is truly reliant on cooperation, collaboration, community.

Everyone's participation.

(gentle music)