ReferenceA map, a dataset, or a directory. It makes no recommendation.
Breeders & Agronomists
This is the furthest-upstream role in gluten-free brewing, and the one with the least brewing in it. Almost nobody breeds these grains for beer: programs select for yield, drought tolerance, lodging resistance, food quality. Brewers inherit whatever those choices produced. The people here matter because that inheritance is the raw material of everything the rest of this site argues about.
Page established 2026-08-25 · filled 2026-08-27 from the research directory.
How to read it — entry rules, and what a listing means
One owner, but the reader never has to leave. The full description of a person or organization lives in exactly one place: the role page owns the person, the subject page owns the work. But a short identity travels with the name wherever it appears: who they are, where they work, and why they are named here, in a sentence or two. You should never have to click somewhere else to find out who someone is.
Organizations sit inside the role they perform. A breeding program belongs here alongside the breeders who run it.
Described, never endorsed. A listing is a map reference, not a recommendation, and implies no relationship with this site.
What qualifies. A public-facing role, body of work, or programme. Private individuals are not listed without consent.
Corrections and removals: contact us.
The roster — who breeds and studies these grains
Pointers to breeders the research directory already describes. The person and their span are named here; the work lives on the subject pages linked from each entry.
Melinda Yerka — University of Nevada, Reno. Sorghum for malting and brewing. · sorghum
William Rooney — Texas A&M. Specialty and food-grade sorghum lines. · sorghum
Tesfaye Tesso — Kansas State. Grain sorghum improvement for food and feed. · sorghum
Dipak Santra — University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Proso millet breeding. · millet
Kevin Murphy — Washington State University. Restarted public buckwheat breeding in North America; released 'Tinker' (2024). · buckwheat
Christian de Guzman — University of Arkansas. Rice breeding at Stuttgart. · rice
Mitch Tuinstra — Purdue University, Wickersham Chair. A climate-resilient cereal genetics program spanning maize and sorghum together. · sorghum · corn · faculty profile
David Jordan — University of Queensland (QAAFI). Leads Australia's public sorghum pre-breeding program, a UQ–Queensland DAF–GRDC partnership. · sorghum · QAAFI profile
Anna Koltunow — University of Queensland (QAAFI). Leads the Hy-Gain program developing apomictic sorghum: hybrids whose seed smallholders can save and replant. · sorghum · QAAFI profile
Richard Boyles — Clemson University, Pee Dee Research and Education Center. Associate professor of cereal grains breeding and genetics, breeding for the southeastern US. · sorghum · faculty profile
Zerihun Tadele — University of Bern, Institute of Plant Sciences. Group leader and head of the Tef Improvement Project, breeding semi-dwarf, lodging-tolerant tef in collaboration with EIAR. · teff · the project
Kebebew Assefa — Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research, Debre Zeit. Ethiopia's national teff research coordinator: germplasm evaluation and the national breeding manual. · teff · profile
Adam Famoso — LSU AgCenter. Rice breeder and director of the H. Rouse Caffey Rice Research Station, doing genomics-driven variety development. · rice · the station
Shashi Kumar Gupta — ICRISAT. Principal Scientist leading the pearl millet breeding program, developing the parental lines behind hybrids grown across the crop's home geographies. · millet · ICRISAT profile
Clayton Campbell — Kade Research, Morden, Manitoba. The private buckwheat breeder behind the self-pollinating North American lines, per the trade coverage. · buckwheat · his program, as reported
Rick Jellen — Brigham Young University. Chromosomal geneticist who has bred quinoa with Jeff Maughan since 2004. · quinoa & amaranth · profile
Moussa D. Sanogo — Institut d'Economie Rurale, Cinzana research station, Ségou, Mali. The Malian breeder carrying West African fonio germplasm knowledge into the crop's genomics. · fonio
This page owns the people above; the research directory owns their work. Growing.
Bodies & gatherings — the associations, genebanks and meetings this role runs through
Genebanks, funders, release authorities and meetings: the things a breeder joins, requests material from, applies to, or attends. Employers are not listed here; an affiliation sits in the identifier line of the person who holds it.
IRRI — International Rice Research Institute, Philippines. The global center of rice science and germplasm, the deepest research infrastructure behind any gluten-free brewing grain. · rice · IRRI
CIMMYT — International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, Mexico. The global maize center and germplasm bank, holding the genetic diversity of corn's home continent. · corn · CIMMYT
ICRISAT — the semi-arid tropics center. The global institution for sorghum and pearl millet: germplasm, breeding programs, and the partner network across the crops' home geographies. · sorghum · millet · ICRISAT
The USDA plant germplasm collections — Ames and Pullman. The national genebank stations behind this family's grains: the Ames station carries the amaranth curation project, quinoa included, and the Pullman collection supplied the first US teff seed, by the importing company's own account. · quinoa & amaranth · teff · the Ames station
African Orphan Crops Consortium. The public–private genomics program covering two of this family's grains: open-source genomic resources and African breeder training. · fonio · teff · the consortium
Joint FAO/IAEA Centre — plant breeding and genetics. The international programme whose mutation-breeding techniques run inside the tef pipeline, a standing institutional bridge between nuclear science and variety development. · teff · the tef work
The McKnight Foundation Collaborative Crop Research Program. The funder behind fonio's two major projects and the tef grants running through Debre Zeit: a program a breeder applies to rather than works for. · fonio · teff
The Gates Foundation. The private funder behind two programmes named on this page: apomictic sorghum at QAAFI, and the genome-edited semi-dwarf tef work at the Danforth Center. · sorghum · teff
INIA — Peru's National Institute of Agricultural Innovation. The homeland's quinoa breeding authority: the named national varieties and the seed conservatories behind the world's largest producer. · quinoa & amaranth
PROINPA — Bolivia. The Andean research foundation for native crops: quinoa breeding, integrated pest management, and regenerative agriculture for the Altiplano. · quinoa & amaranth
The International Quinoa Research Symposium. The crop's recurring research convening, with a standing home produced by WSU's Sustainable Seed Systems Lab. · quinoa & amaranth · the symposium
ICRISAT Pearl Millet Scientists' Field Day. The global breeding program's recurring gathering of pearl millet researchers and partners. · millet · the field day
Organic Seed Alliance. The seed-systems nonprofit building a Pacific Northwest buckwheat community with WSU: farmer networks and regional seed systems around a crop with almost no public breeding behind it. · buckwheat · the work
NW Buckwheat Festival. The annual August gathering of farmers, chefs, researchers and food champions in the Pacific Northwest, co-hosted by WSU and the Organic Seed Alliance since 2023, the demand-building counterpart to the research calendar. · buckwheat · the 2024 edition
Working with them — how a brewer, maltster or researcher engages this role
This is the thinnest section on the page, and the reason is honest. This site explains at length what makes a good malting grain; it does not yet document how to request germplasm, how to approach a breeding programme about brewing traits, or what a breeder needs from a brewer to take a brewing request seriously. What follows is what the site can actually support today. The rest is work not yet written.
Know what you would be asking for. Before contacting anyone, the acceptance criteria are in what makes good malting sorghum: the traits a brewer or maltster would actually want a program to select for, stated as a grain-acceptance guide rather than a breeding brief.
Bring a specification, because none exists. There is no agreed malting-sorghum standard for a breeder to select against. Our draft evaluation standard is this site's attempt at one, published open for comment. A target to argue with is more useful to a breeding program than a request without numbers.
Read the cultivar data before proposing new work. Two screening datasets already sit here in full: the USDA Madison screening of 25 named cultivars, and the 2002–2004 screenings of 74 samples including breeding lines. Much of what a brewer would think to ask has been measured once already.
Bring a question, not a wish. The open questions this site cannot answer alone (cultivar enzyme screening among them) are written up as research asks, with what counts as useful evidence and how to report it.
Be able to say which cultivar you actually got. A conversation with a breeder is worth little if the grain's identity is not knowable downstream; that discipline lives in identity preservation and lot identity and traceability.
How this role connects — documented links to other roles and subjects
- Breeding decides whether the grain malts at all. The malt-quality spread across named cultivars in the USDA Madison screening — extract, diastatic power, alpha-amylase, FAN — is a set of breeding outcomes landing on a maltster's floor years later.
- The specification is missing in both directions. A brewer has no agreed malting-sorghum standard to state back, which is why this site drafted one; until it settles, brewers and breeders are describing the same grain in different vocabularies.
- Variety release is what a grower can plant. Everything a grower can put in the ground was decided upstream by a breeding program and a release process, usually on food or feed criteria.
- Enzymes are where breeding meets brewing science. Screening diverse sorghum accessions for malt amylase activity is a breeding question answered with brewing instruments: the material researchers work with on internal enzymes.
- Cultivar identity has to be verifiable. DNA fingerprinting of sorghum cultivars is the genetic method beneath identity-preserved grain, which is what labs and certifiers are ultimately checking. · sorghum
- Protein is a breeder's trait and a maltster's problem. Grain protein varies enough across sorghum samples that measuring it reliably is its own research question — the USDA 2023 NIR dataset covers 92 samples from a single harvest — and protein is where FAN comes from.
- Tannins are inherited, and they are both a flavor and a conversion problem. Tannin content varies by cultivar, bird-resistant varieties carry markedly more, and the same compounds a taster registers as astringency are documented amylase inhibitors. · flavor and sensory
- Starch structure is a cultivar property. Amylose content and starch structure vary at cultivar level, which is where gelatinization temperature comes from: a breeding decision setting a mash decision.
- The cultivar-to-flavor question is already answered for other grains. The distilling literature has studied sorghum variety against fermentation microecology and flavor in baijiu, and cultivar stability of alcohol yield in distilling wheats: the question gluten-free brewing has not yet asked of its own grains. · distilling
- Private breeders are where this role meets the supply chain. The commercial seed layer (hybrid rice, proso millet, buckwheat lines) is the point at which breeding becomes something a supplier can sell.
- The amateur layer runs the trials nobody funds. Cultivar-level experiments are cheap in a homebrew kettle and expensive in a research program, which is why the research asks are written for homebrewers and home maltsters.
- Nobody breeds these grains for beer, and that is the connection. Every trait this site cares about (enzyme potential, extract, tannin load, starch behavior) is a side effect of selection for yield, drought tolerance, lodging resistance or food quality. The grains directory is a record of what brewing inherited rather than what it chose.
Who's missing — where this page's coverage runs out
- Almost nobody on this roster breeds for brewing. One program on this page is described as breeding sorghum specifically for malting and brewing traits. Everyone else is here because brewers inherit their work, not because they aim at it, which is the finding, not a hole in the research.
- No body listed here convenes on malting quality. The genebanks, funders and field days above are crop bodies. We have found no association, committee or meeting where breeders and maltsters of gluten-free grain set quality targets together: the absence the draft evaluation standard exists to name.
- The roster is skewed toward English-language sources. Most of the world's sorghum, millet, fonio and teff acreage sits in Africa, India and China, and the breeding programs serving it are larger than what appears here. Chinese sorghum breeding reaches this page only through the baijiu literature.
- Corn, buckwheat and amaranth are thin. The maize people the research directory names are quantitative geneticists in public programs, not people breeding corn for brewing; buckwheat's public breeding in North America was restarted only recently; and amaranth appears mainly through germplasm curation rather than an active breeding roster.
- We carry no variety release records. Release documents, registrations and pedigrees are the primary sources behind everything on this page, and none of them are indexed here. A breeder checking our work would have to go to the registrations directly.
Breed or study these grains, or know someone who does? Tell us.