Hands to Harvest! “Bringing in the Sheaves” in 2018

Few words conjure up richer connotations of summertime, country life, and abundance than harvest. During the past three weeks we have commenced harvesting our Palouse Heritage grains and are pleased to report excellent quality and yield. Ever being interested in matters of origin, I decided to investigate the derivation of the word “harvest,” and learned that it is derived from German Herbst (autumn). That word in turn descends from a root shared by Latin carp- (“to gather”) and Greek karpos (“fruit”). “Harvest” in the sense of reaping grain and other crops came into vernacular use during the medieval era of Middle English.

Palouse Heritage Yellow Breton Wheat Harvest near Connell, Washington (July, 2018)

Likely due to the light color of a wheat kernel’s interior endosperm, the word “wheat” in many European languages meant “white,” as with Old English whete, Welsh gwenith, and German weizzi. The Latin term “gladiators,” hordearii, literally means “barley eaters” since they subsisted on high energy foods like barley, oatmeal, and legumes. Roman legionaries were routinely outfitted with sickles in order to procure their livelihood throughout the far flung empire, and probably used them more often that their weapons. The helical frieze on Trajan’s Column in Rome (c. 110 AD) features a dynamic group scene of soldiers in full uniform harvesting waist-high grain with prodigious heads.

These days we don’t need to rely on sickles and legionnaires to bring in the crop. Good friends like Brad Bailie of Lenwood Farms near Connell, Washington, raise bountiful crops of organic Palouse Heritage varieties like Crimson Turkey and Yellow Breton. The latter is a soft red variety native to the northern France where for generations it was used for the prized flour essential for flavorful crepes. Farther to the northeast in the vicinity of Endicott, Washington, our longtime friends Joe DeLong and Chuck Jordan are harvestings stands of Palouse Heritage Red Fife, a famous bread grain originally from Eastern Europe, Sonoran Gold wheat, and Scots Bere barley that has become one of the most sought-after craft brewing malt grains.

Although there are some variations in climate and soil across the inland Pacific Northwest, this fertile region lies within the great arc of the Columbia River’s “Big Bend” easily identified on any map. While reading through some old newspapers recently I encountered the following poem titled “The Big Bend” by Louis Todd that was published in 1900. Little else is known about Todd’s life, but his literary expressions here make it clear he greatly appreciated this land of harvest time “golden splendor.”

No other river to the ocean

   Will a tale like thine unfold,

Of the wealth seen in thy travels;

   Of the wealth thy borders hold;

For thy thoughts the grandeur bear,

   And thy breath the sweetness breathes,

Of the boundless fields and forests,

   Of the richly laden trees.

And there grows within thy roaring

   All the fairest of the vine;

Luscious fruits in clusters hanging

   From the north and southern clime.

Great fields of wheat in golden splendor,

   Waving like a mighty sea,

Holding safe their precious treasure

   ’Till the grain shall ripened be.

Where nature works with freest hand,

   Builds her greatest work of art,

Will the feeble life of man

   There most smoothly play its part.

Oh, leave the dreary course you travel,

   Spurn the rocky path you go,

Join again your life with Nature,

   Where the fragrant flowers grow.

Palouse Heritage Red Fife Wheat Harvest (July, 2018)

Turkey Red Wheat Harvest 2017

This past week marked the beginning of our Palouse Heritage harvest as our first crop of organic Turkey Red bread wheat was cut at our partner Brad Bailie’s Lenwood Farms near Connell, Washington. We have been raising this legendary hard red bread grain for the past two years in order to carefully increase our seed stock, and finally this year we had enough for several acres of organic production at Brad’s farm since we needed space at our Palouse Colony Farm for the flavorful soft red variety English Redhead, also known as Red Walla Walla, which historically was used for pastries, biscuits, and other flatbreads as well as for crafting nutritious Old World Hefeweizen cloudy brews.

Harvesting Organic Turkey Red Wheat; Scene of the Great Yellow Jacket Harvest Battle

Turkey Red is the legendary grain long raised by our German ancestors in Eastern Europe where bread wheats had grown since time immemorial from the Great Hungarian Plain to the steppes of Russia and Ukraine. Prior to the introduction of Turkey Red to the Midwest in the 1870s, a winter variety sown in the fall, and its genetic spring-seeded cousin, Red Fife, an Eastern European relative that came to North American via Scotland, all wheat breads in early America and Canada were made from soft white flour sometimes mixture with low gluten milled rye, barley, or oats, or “thirded” combinations of these grains. The resulting baked goods were rather dense but still flavorful and served as the “staff of life” for countless families in eastern American and on the western frontier. Our elders here in the Northwest told us that their crops of Turkey Red as recent as the 1950s were too precious to sell like modern hybridized grains for national and world markets. Instead they held back sufficient quantities of Turkey Red to be milled at area flour mills in Colfax, St. John, and at tiny Pataha south of the Snake River near Pomeroy where historic Houser Mill has been substantially restored by the Van Vogt family with a portion of the main floor refurbished as a restaurant and museum.

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"Our elders here in the Northwest told us that their crops of Turkey Red as recent as the 1950s were too precious to sell like modern hybridized grains for national and world markets."

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Unexpected happenings often occur when commencing harvest and this year’s first round provided a couple interesting moments. After going a few dozen yards on our first round in Brad’s combine, I stepped behind the machine to blow on the ground and see if too much grain was being blown behind. Even the most advanced combine in this day of high tech threshing and electronic monitoring betrays some grain loss, but Brad’s John Deere was running very clean. I jumped back on and paused when entering the cab so we could check for any cracked grain going into the bulk tank where the grain is stored before unloading into a truck or in our case, large fabric totes capable of holding a ton. We had no sooner reached our arms back to retrieve a handful of grain that a wild onslaught of very angry yellow-jackets burst forth swirling around our heads! In an instant we received their stinging message of most likely disturbing a nest in the process of putting running augers and dumping grain into the bin, so we retreated back into the safety of the cab.

Marsh Hawk Stubble Nest

On the next pass around the field I noticed an enormous bird fly from the uncut grain we were approaching as the combine reel flailed along like a rapidly moving ferris-wheel. Brad immediately stopped the machine and said he it was one of several marsh hawks with whom he had shared his property. Brad is an advocate of natural growing systems and seeks to preserve native species, so was concerned that the hawk’s next was likely in the path of the combine’s next round. We descended the ladder and slowly approached the area in the uncut wheat from which the bird had taken flight. Sure enough there we found a trampled area about two feet in diameter with two white eggs resting in the center. Late July seems somewhat late for a hatch, but not being experts on marsh hawk habits we thought the eggs were likely still vital or they would not still be tended. So we returned to the machine and cut in a wide circle all around the next to keep it protected, and hoped no coyotes would find their way to the small golden sanctuary.

Later in the day I took a sample of the Turkey Red to the Connell Grain Growers substantial grain handling facility in Kennewick in order to get it tested for protein and moisture. The place is a massive complex located along the Columbia River and a several tractor-trailers filled with wheat were waiting in line to dump their loads in the elevator grates for storage in the adjacent concrete and metal silos. I was ably assisted by Kara Shibley, Angie Garcia, and Jose Carrea-Moya who shared my interest in heritage grains though our conversation was regularly interrupted by intercom calls and other office traffic attesting the incredible pace of harvest work inside such offices as well as out in the fields. The result came back in moments most satisfactorily, so we did it again with another sample and the numbers were identical—low 9.1% moisture, and very strong 13.5% protein—fully two percent higher than the average of modern hard red wheats then coming to the elevator. With that good news it was back to work and preparations to harvest our stands of soft red English Squarehead (aka Red Russian), Purple Egyptian hulless barley, and other grains scarcely seen in the region for over a century. The flavorful and nutritious adventure continues!

Jose Correa-Moya Testing Turkey Red Wheat for Moisture and Protein; CHS Elevator; Pasco, Washington

A Heritage Grains Adventure Through Europe, Part 1

German Grain Fields and Academy Artists

 After completing my recent trek along California’s El Camino Real and previous Mid-Atlantic exploration of Colonial heritage grains and agrarian art (see blog series here), I turned my attention to Europe as opportunity had arisen through Journey Tours of Wenatchee, Washington, to lead a group on a ten-day Baltic cruise preceded by several days in Germany. A special benefit was that my wife, Lois, was able to join me and also enjoy the fellowship of several longtime friends who accompanied us on the tour that commenced in Frankfurt, a. M. where our group convened for a remarkable summertime adventure. One of our first destinations was the Hessenpark Open Air Museum north of the Frankfurt about twenty-five miles and where over 100 historic buildings, many of them timber-frame structures dating from the 1700s, had been relocated and restored since 1974 in a substantial park covering 160 acres.  Hessenpark is divided into several village sections representing the surrounding state’s several regions, and contains several small farmsteads where heritage grains and fruits are raised. We found Kaiser Wilhelm and King of Pippin apples but I was most interested in the park’s maturing stands of ancient emmer, einkorn, and spelt, grains that are the prehistoric precursors of all heritage grains.

Hessenpark Heritage Grain Plots (left to right): Einkorn, Spelt, Emmer

The entrance to Hessenpark features a substantial art gallery that showcases paintings, etchings, and other works that depict agrarian experience in central Germany. We learned that Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Munich, and other major German cities hosted art academies that became widely known for interpretations of nature and rural life through new approaches to subject, color, and composition. Peter von Cornelius (1784-1867) and Wilhelm von Schadow (1789-1862) served successively as influential directors of the Düsseldorf Academy spanning the decades from 1819 to 1859 when Kunstakademie artists painted finely detailed and often fanciful, allegorical landscapes that significantly influenced many prominent American Hudson River painters including George Caleb Bingham and William Morris Hunt.  Cornelius and van Schadow were among the earliest members of Lukasbund (Brothers of Luke), derisively called The Nazarenes for their close-cropped hair and pious lifestyle, who had banded together in Rome as young men in order to grow spiritually and rediscover the nearly lost techniques used by Renaissance Italian masters for monumental fresco painting.  The Nazarenes chose to paint Old and New Testament religious scenes with timeless messages and selected the story of Joseph from the Book of Genesis for their first major commission which was installed as five sections in 1817 for the banqueting hall of Rome’s Palazzo Zuccari (present Bibliotheca Hertziana), residence of the Prussian Consul-General Jacob Bartholdy. Cornelius’s Joseph Interprets Pharaoh’s Dream features a shield of grain stalks to represent the young prophet’s explanation of the coming seasons of abundant harvests following by the lean years, and The Seven Years of Plenty by Philipp Veit (1793-1877) shows a seated maiden and children surrounded by fruit and golden sheaves of grain. Known later as the Casa Bartholdy Frescoes, the paintings and their creators became famous and in the 1880s were transferred to Berlin’s National Gallery. 

Casa Bartholdy Frescoes, Philipp Veit, The Seven Years of Plenty (1817), Peter von Cornelius, Joseph Interprets Pharoah’s Dream (1817), Old National Gallery, Berlin

One of Germany’s most prolific painters of harvest and other agrarian scenes, Hugo Mühlig (1854-1929), was born in Dresden to a family of prominent landscapists. He became a seasonal participant in the country’s oldest art colony, the Willingshäusen Malerkolonie, which had been established in the picturesque Hessian village north of Frankfurt, a. M. surrounded by rolling hills and valleys bathed in a liquid light that had long attracted artists to the area. Colony founder and Baltic German Gerhardt Wilhelm von Reutern (1794-1865) had come to Willingshäusen to recover from serious injuries suffered when a commander in the Russian army at the 1814 Battle of Leipzig. The Romanov family provided von Reutern a stipend and with encouragement from Goethe and Emil Lugwig Grimm, the third of the brothers Grimm, he decided to convalesce in the area and paint local inhabitants and scenery.

Landscape painter and book illustrator Hans Richard von Volkmann, a native of Halle who trained at the Düsseldorf Academy, also frequented Willingshausen. Some of von Volkman’s work anticipates Art Nouveau, and he rendered many harvest scenes in masterful sepia etchings including Field Road (1907), Harvest Time, Willingshausen (1909), and Cloudy Day (1910). Düsseldorf native Leopold Graf von Kalckreuth (1855-1928) became an influential professor of portraiture and landscape art at Weimar and Stuttgart where he painted many peasant farming scenes including The Gleaners (1888), Reapers in Bergsulza (1888), and Harvest Time (1900). Von Kalckreuth’s views are notable for the melancholy depiction of female field laborers who seem to shoulder their burdens with stoic indifference. Summer captures an expectant mother clad in blue with a white headscarf striding forth deep in thought alongside a patch of ripened grain.

Leopold Graf von Kalckreuth, Summer (1890), Oil on canvas, 140 ⅙ x 115 ¾ inches, Royal Danish Museum, Copenhagen

The Tsar’s Village and Imperial Farm at St. Petersburg

 The next destination on this summertime Baltic cruise was St. Petersburg, Tsar Peter the Great’s spectacular “Window on the West” to which he moved the imperial capital in the early 1700s and which remained the seat of the Russian government until the early 20th century. After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution its name was changed to Leningrad and distant Moscow became Russia’s capital again. Since the 1990s St. Petersburg’s original name has been restored and considerable development has returned much of the city to its original splendor after considerable damage during the Second World War and economic stagnation under Communist rule. Mr. Putin is not nearly as interested in the ways of the West as was Peter the Great, but we were treated warmly by our Russia hosts and treated to unforgettable tours of Peterhof Palace west of the city, and to Catherine the Great’s legendary Winter Palace and Hermitage.

Peterhof Palace near St. Petersburg, Russia

 Catherine was a contemporary of George Washington, and has gone down in history as sympathetic to the American cause for not supporting British King George’s request to send troops to help defeat the Colonists. And while Peter the Great was greatly interested in modernizing the military and building new cities, Catherine had special interest in improving Russian agriculture. In the 1760s she issued a special manifesto inviting foreigners to settle on the vast steppes of southern Russia and supply the country and continent with grain. In this way my ancestors immigrated to Russia in the 1760s and settled in the Volga River region near Saratov where they introduced productive grains like Saxonka soft red wheat. A century afterward, in the 1870s, some of their descendants began relocating to the United States to become farmers in the Mid-Atlantic states, Midwest, and beyond. By 1920, over 100,000 of these “German-Russians” were living in the Pacific Northwest. In the process, hard red bread wheats native to south Russia and Ukraine like Red Fife and Turkey Red made their way to North America in the 1800s and became the first true bread wheats ever raised in the United States and Canada.

Palouse Heritage Turkey Red Wheat

Palouse Heritage Red Fife Wheat

Among many other accomplishments during her long reign, the Empress Catherine the Great composed children’s stories like Tsarevitch Chlor, a morality tale set in the Russian countryside where the young man must find the right path for his own wellbeing and that of others through pursuit of virtue and application of reason. “…[T]hey saw a peasant’s hut and some acres of very fertile land in which there was every cereal: rye, oats, barley, buckwheat and others. Further, they saw pastures on which sheep, cows, and horses were grazing.” Catherine further commissioned a breathtaking project to transform a vast area near the summer palace at Tsarskoe Selo, the “Tsar’s Village” west of St. Petersburg, into an allegorical landscape shaped by her conception of this Russian ideal. Catherine found in Orthodox priest and agronomist Andrei Samborsky (1732-1815) a teacher with the proper background to tutor her grandsons and a small circle of privileged classmates like Prince Alexander Golitsyn. After graduating from the Kiev Academy in 1765, Samborsky had studied agriculture in England and served as chaplain at the Russian Embassy in London, married an Englishwoman, and returned to Russia to begin tutoring the Russian dukes in religion and natural science in 1782.

 K. K. Schultz, Imperial Farm Cottage, c. 1835 (Tsarskoe Selo west of St. Petersburg), Views of St. Petersburg and Moscow (1847)

With the Empress’s support, Samborsky formulated plans for an Imperial Farm and School of Practical Agriculture on a thousand acres adjacent to Tsarskoe Selo (Tsar’s Village) which became an important state institution devoted to the improvement of crop and livestock production and farm management. An engraving from the time shows Samborsky plowing with an improved English implement as his distinguished Order of St. Vladimir medal hangs from a nearby tree. Open land in the vicinity was sown to wheat, rye, pasture grass, and other crops while workers labored nearby in the 1780s atPavlovsk, the splendid summer palace of Catherine’s son, Paul I, and from 1792 to 1796 on his son’s Neoclassical residence, the Alexander Palace. The first structure built at Pavlovsk was the open air Temple to Ceres (later Catherine’s Concert Hall, 1780) by the empress’s favored architect Charles Cameron (1745-1812), a colonnaded Doric rotunda that originally contained a statue of Catherine as Ceres and the painted panel An Offering to Ceres. Images of Ceres and a variety of grain and other botanical designs also adorn the magnificent Raphael Loggias commissioned in the 1780s by Catherine for the walls of a new wing the Hermitage. Austrian artist Christoph Unterberger (1732-1798) led the ambitious project of replicating Raphael’s sixteenth century originals for the Vatican Palace, where they have since been lost. Unterberger and his team worked from 1783 to 1792 to complete the meticulous and vivid designs for Catherine’s great hall using egg tempura on canvas.

Christoph Unterberger, Raphael Loggias and Grain Motif Panels (c. 1783), Winter Palace and Hermitage, St. Petersburg

The Imperial Farm as originally constructed from 1828 to 1830 under Tsar Nicholas I (1796-1855) featured buildings of Tudor Gothic country style designed by Scottish architect Adam Menelaws (c. 1750-1831) with a Farm Cottage built nearby as an izba containing rooms for visiting members of the imperial family. Outbuildings included a stone barn, stables, granary, and dairy, and a kitchen redesigned in 1841 to serve as a Grand Ducal School. The Cottage was expanded to three floors in the late 1850s with the addition of bedrooms, and dining and drawing rooms. An imposing two-story ocher-colored Farm Palace and surrounding gardens were then built nearby in English country style which Alexander II used as his favored summer residence for the rest his life. When time permitted, Alexander especially enjoyed his Blue Study which displayed favored paintings and fine bindings. Produce from the farm was used to provision residents and workers at Tsarskoe Selo estates.

With support from his influential minister and spiritual advisor Alexander Golitsyn (1773-1844), Alexander I approved creation in 1819 of the Moscow Agricultural Society which began operation three years later. The important precedent for such a voluntary association with agricultural interests had been the Free Economic Society established by Catherine in 1765, though the Moscow association was solely devoted to promotion of progress in the empire’s farming sector by influential landowners and scientists through “a harmonious fusion of west European improvements and native traditions. Through study and dissemination of rational techniques to improve production, prevent regional crop failures, and advance agricultural education, the society represented an important step in translating Enlightenment thought into practical action. Alexander II held numerous meetings at the Farm Palace on land reform and appropriately composed the Emancipation Edict of 1861 abolishing serfdom in the while residing there.

This blog post is continued in Part 2, available here.

The Latest Crop in the Local Food Movement? Wheat

Kristan Lawson from modernfarmer.com published a remarkably important article last summer discussing how wheat is experiencing a renaissance with small farmers revolutionizing the local food movement by growing heirloom and landrace grains with unique terroir. The article so effectively conveys the message we at Palouse Heritage champion that we wanted to feature it here in our blog. The author quotes our dear grains scientist from Washington State University, Steve Lyon and even mentions two landrace grain varieties we are growing, Red Fife and Sonoran Gold! Here are the highlights. You can read the full article on modernfarmer.com here.

Ripe wheat on Camas Country Mill in Central Oregon, Courtesy Tom Hunton and modernfarmer.com

Until very recently, small farms have tended to avoid planting wheat because it's not very profitable per acre. Commercially, wheat is grown in such vast quantities that it's usually sold not by the pound but by the ton. For centuries, society has considered wheat a faceless "commodity" like iron ore or cotton, every sack anonymous and interchangeable.

But that’s all about to change. Wheat is experiencing a renaissance as chefs, food writers, and savvy consumers discover that each kernel holds a universe of long-forgotten flavors, a terroir: Wheat from one area tastes different from the wheat in another, and each varietal has a different flavor profile from the one down the road.

And when wheat is no longer treated as a high-volume/low-price commodity, small farmers can start commanding top dollar for unique grain grown in a unique way on their unique land.

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But is it really possible to tell the difference between heirloom wheat hand-tended in small plots and nameless factory wheat? When you come right down to it, it’s all just … wheat, a flavor that’s always in the background, never the star. In fact, in blind taste tests, even top wine experts can’t tell different wines apart. Aren’t wheat terroirs just as indistinguishable?

No, says Dr. Stephen Jones at the Washington State University Bread Lab. As a leading expert in wheat genetics, he’s proven that different wheat strains and growing conditions do produce unique flavor profiles. “We do taste tests all the time in our lab with bakers, chefs, students, and even random visitors. People notice big differences in wheat flavor based on where it’s grown—especially when it’s fresh-milled 100-percent whole wheat. That’s where the flavors are.”

Although wine connoisseurs have developed an entire vocabulary to describe the subtle aromas hidden in a glass of Zinfandel or Chardonnay, the specialty wheat dialect is still in its infancy. “Sadly, we don’t yet have terms for all the different flavors in wheat,” says Klein. “But we’re working on it.” Taste-testers at the Bread Lab have volunteered such expressions as “nutty,” “earthy,” “bright,” “chewy,” “warm,” and “gratifying.” It’s a start.

Modern American farmers did not invent the notion that specific varietals of wheat from various geographic regions have different flavors; you can trace the concept back to Italy centuries ago, where each Italian region championed the quality, texture, and taste of their own wheat pasta over all others. The recent rise of major nationally distributed pasta brands eroded the regionalism, but now Italian pasta terroir is making a comeback, too. Companies like Rustichella d’Abruzzo have begun to release pastas made exactly as they were in the 19th century, such as their “PrimoGrano” line which exclusively uses hyper-localized ancient wheat strains only discovered in the hills of the Abruzzo region; a handful of acres are harvested and processed using traditional methods to make a single batch of pasta once per year, released to connoisseurs like the rarest of wines.

Just as there is no “best” type of grape, there is no single all-purpose heritage wheat “better” than the others. Small farmers are re-discovering that ancient wheat strains, known as “landraces,” each excel in different culinary contexts: Red Fife, originally from prehistoric Anatolia but perfected in Canada, is unbeatable for bread flour, for example; Sonora Wheat, the first wheat brought to the Americas by Spanish conquistadors, makes the perfect tortilla; Mesopotamian Durum, the grand-daddy of them all, dating back 9,000 years, is the basis for impeccable pasta.

When applied to wheat, the term “landrace” refers to any ancient variety cultivated so far in the past and for so long that it evolved to thrive in a specific ecosystem; nowadays these primitive types are cherished as the source of wheat’s genetic diversity, which is otherwise being lost as modern high-yield strains dominate all others. The very word “landrace” is appropriate here as well, since “land-” in this context means both “regional area” and “the ground” (while in botany “-race” means “distinctive sub-variety”), so “landrace” is the native English word closest in meaning to the French terroir.

For American farmers, the difficult part about marketing these heirloom strains is convincing consumers to give wheat a second look. You can only charge a premium for specialty wheat if customers are willing to pay. Paul Muller, co-owner of Full Belly Farm in Guinda, California—who grows the heirloom Iraqi Durum used by Community Grains to make its fettuccine—is excited about the wheat renaissance.

“I’ve grown up around wheat all my life,” Muller says, “and until recently no one has really talked about flavor. But now food writers and chefs are saying, ‘Hey, we love this wheat.’ People are finally paying attention to it. We as wheat farmers are now growing a food, not a commodity.”

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Klein is convinced that the flavors of these heirloom and landrace wheat varieties are only as good as the soil in which they’re sown. “Wheat like ours from small farms tastes superior because it’s grown in very good nutrient-rich soil,” he says. “Most generic wheat, conversely, comes from nutrient-depleted soil, because in the United States we usually grow wheat where the land is cheap, which is not great nutrient-wise. The better farmland is normally reserved for more profitable crops. But wheat from good soil gives a more ‘animated’ flavor, especially in fresh-baked bread.”

WSU’s Jones agrees that wheat grown in more desirable areas produces a vastly superior grain: “With grapes, the big flavors come from intentionally stressing the vines, but with wheat we have discovered it’s the opposite—the big flavors do not come from stress but from cool and moist conditions.”

Tom Hunton of Camas Country Mill in central Oregon is spearheading the wheat terroir movement in the Pacific Northwest, not only growing specialty wheats such as Edison Hard White (described as “buttery” and “golden”) but also inviting a growing community of local grain farmers to share his new state-of-the-art stone grist mill; without this access, they’d have to sell their high-end wheat at much lower prices on the commodity market, where its terroir would be lost.

From this small cooperative beginning, Hunton has big dreams: “We desire to bring taste and flavor to as large a population as possible, at an affordable price point,” he says.“We want to move beyond food for the elite and share these phenomenal flavorful varietals with a broader audience.”

Cascadia Grains Conference 2017

We just wrapped up a unique opportunity to not just attend the best grains conference in the world, but actively participate by presenting a "historical tasting" event. The Cascadia Grains conference this year was again a huge success. It was a wonderful time to gather with others who share our love for grains. I led the historical tasting presentation, which focused on a sampling of Washington State's early grain economies. 

A video recording of the presentation is available on our YouTube channel here. We apologize for the poor quality. (Rest assured, we'll be recording our future events in HD!). You can also view my slide deck used in the talk here. Below is a copy of the menu pamphlet describing the historical dishes and grain descriptions for each era. 

Reuben small bites made with Turkey Red Wheat paired with Ghost Fish IPA (Chris Lozier photo)

Smoked oyster and brie crostini made with Sonoran Gold Wheat (Chris Lozier photo)

Smoked salmon and dill scone made with Scots Bere Barley paired with Top Rung Brewery Scout Stout (Chris Lozier photo)

And below are a few more photos from the event. Palouse Heritage was also privileged to be one of the sponsors for this year's conference. We are extremely grateful to the Cascadia Grains team for allowing us to share and be involved in these ways.

Cherry Cobbler made with Palouse Heritage Red Fife wheat flour and Sandstone Gin Sorbet

Palouse Heritage was happy to be a sponsor for this year's conference!