The bin on the left holds 800,000 bushels of barley–you do the math!
This past week I had the pleasure of visiting the Briess WY barley operations and growers appreciation dinner in Powell, WY. I traveled with my guests Joe Casey of Craft Brew Alliance, Matt Johnson of Karl Strauss Brewing and Scott Fisk who is a barley research dude from Oregon State University in Corvallis. We were given an excellent tour of our above pictured grain elevator and our certified seed plant by operations manager Rick Redd–he runs a very tight ship. As this Big Horn Basin area of the country is high elevation desert at 4,300ft it takes a lot of irrigation water that is pulled from the Shoshone River Irrigation District/Buffalo Bill Dam and the barley we harvest there is delightfully bright and plump!
The Buffalo Bill Dam on the Shoshone River (upriver side obviously)
This is an old wooden ball plug that was historically used to plug the 42″ outlet hole in the dam.
The growers dinner was outstanding and we had 200+ in attendance for the BBQ dinner + beer, speakers and the all important raffle–we even gave out a few homebrew kits as prizes. I think one of the hits of the dinner was the special appreciation belt buckle we gave out to each of our growers. Thank you WY/MT Briess growers for all you do to insure we have super high quality barley for the craft brewers!!!
I know you want one of these belt buckles…
This was the place mat we had made for the growers dinner–they are farmers not brewers!
This pic of the elevator was shamelessly stolen from Tooch Photography Studio, nice work!
We couldn’t figure out if this product was to make you smell MORE like a bear (aka bear aftershave) or was a bear repellent…
We selected six styles of craft beer from a local distributor for our barley growers to enjoy during the dinner…Redhook ESB, Widmer Alchemy Pale, Widmer Drop Top Amber, Deschutes Black Butte Porter, New Belgium Fat Tire, Avery Brown.
Here’s a shot of the Briess staff and guest speakers at the dinner. Left to right are Dave Richter (Division Manager-West), Dave Luckow (Manitowoc WI Ops Manager), Matt Johnson (Karl Strauss Brewing Co. Senior Brewer), Judy Bullinger (WY Barley Ops Office Manager), Ron Mihalko (Waterloo WI Ops Manager), Scott Fisk (Oregon State University Barley Breeder Program), Joe Casey (Craft Brew Alliance Senior Director of Brewing), Gordon Lane (Pres/COO), and Rick Redd (WY Barley Ops Manager).
