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Narrator: Craft beer makers in the Maritimes are in the market more locally grown hops and barley.
Currently the bulk of these key ingredients in beer making have to be imported from other parts of North America.
With investment from local beer makers and working with the Atlantic Grain Council...
...researchers at the Harrington Research Farm on Prince Edward Island...
...have pin-pointed two promising barley varieties they believe can be sucessfully grown by the region's farmers.
Aaron Mills:  We can definitely grow it here but we need to hammer out the agronomy so that growers know what to do.
So with this study here we're looking at two malt barley varieties and a couple of different management factors...
...that we've thrown in there.  What separates us from other malt and barley studies that have been done previously...
...is that everything is getting malted and we're measuring the malt quality from five different sites in eastern North America.
Narrator:  You can't have beer without the flavour and aroma of hops and at the Harrington hops yard...
...ten varieties have been put through two years of trials with some successful candidates emerging.
Aaron Mills:  Growers are really interested in getting a local product...
...or local materials to put together their local product...
...and that's basically what we're doing.  There is a bit of a gap of knowledge...
...for how to do this on the east coast.  We've got a lot of rain and we've got a shorter season...
...so we need to figure out how to grow them here.
Narrator:  Results from the barley trials will be turned over to famers in 2015 as a guide to growing barley locally for malting.
And more trials are in the works for hops.
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