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Grain Research Directories

Eight grains, one method: each page below maps who is working on that grain as a brewing ingredient — institutions, researchers, projects, funders, industry, organizations, and literature, so that anyone entering the field can see where the work lives.

Who this is for. The primary reader is the serious practitioner or researcher who needs the prior art: what has been done on this grain, by whom, and where the record runs out, before starting work of their own. Funders, students, and industry scouts are welcome secondary readers; no page here assumes you have read the rest of the site.

Every directory follows the same rules: brief, factual, dated entries, each linking to a primary source; documented relationships between entries; and honest accounting of where a field's coverage runs out. Coverage is US-centered by design, with international anchors where the science is foundational. Three rules matter most to a reader:

  • Described, never endorsed. A listing is a map reference, not a recommendation.
  • Public information only. Relationships between entries are documented only when a primary source shows them; these pages carry no contact details and nothing from private correspondence.
  • Entries are added on merit once verified — never to pad a count. Run a program, lab, project, or company we should list? Tell us about it.

The eight grains, and the shape of each field​

No two of these maps look alike, and the differences are the most useful thing the family shows:

  • Sorghum — the deepest science in the family: decades of malting research, federal labs, and international funders, and no US brewing-grade supply chain to match it. The flagship page, and the standard the others are held to.
  • Millet — the inversion of sorghum: real commercial malting and real breweries using it today, with a thinner scientific base underneath.
  • Rice — enormous research infrastructure and economics, with its life as a gluten-free base malt still young.
  • Buckwheat — a complete but largely dormant malting corpus, and the family's clearest example of a private company funding the science it needed.
  • Corn — the most-researched crop on earth, a century inside American lager, the legal backbone of bourbon — and almost no malt research at all. The page maps the brewing sliver and deliberately ignores the ocean.
  • Teff — a real but narrow scientific toehold, an ancient fermentation tradition, and a US commercial crop still missing its bridge to brewing.
  • Fonio — the one grain whose brewing visibility was driven by the craft beer industry rather than by cereal science; the commercial story runs ahead of the literature.
  • Quinoa & Amaranth — two pseudocereals sharing a page for an honest reason: each record is too thin to carry a directory alone, and they travel together in the literature that exists.

Cross-grain topics get their own directories beside this family. The first is Enzymes, because enzyme science touches every grain above.

Directory family established 2026-08-24 · corrections welcome — see Contact.