Beer drinkers are a fussy lot.

While they recline in beer gardens around the country, contemplating the glistening gold, creamy head and refreshing effervescence of their favourite brew, barley breeders are sweating on every nuance and detail of their experience.

So particular are their tastes that breeding barley to suit the malting market has proved as difficult for our best scientists as letting a Friday afternoon slip by without sampling the product of their best efforts.

To illustrate the complexity of barley breeding, consider that, with support from growers and the Federal Government through the The Grains Research & Development Corporation (GRDC), new wheat varieties are superseded about every four years, whereas WA’s most popular malting barley variety, Stirling, has been unsurpassed since it was first sown in 1983.

So while wheat breeding efforts continue to drive yields up by an average of one per cent per year, malting barley production remains at 1980 levels.

Of course, higher yielding varieties have been developed, but besides agronomic, disease and pest considerations, they must first satisfy 35 other quality traits to qualify as a malting barley and that has proved challenging. Many of these qualities are not completely understood, which leaves breeders to lament the perplexing behaviour of their barley’s malt and some of the curious demands on it.

For example, tradition dictates that the drinker’s glass should reveal how many sips it took to empty the vessel because the head should leave rings of foam at each level the beer sat at as it slipped away. Any new barley must, therefore, produce forensic froth to impress breweries.

Grain plumpness is also a key to malting quality. Enzymes from under the grain skin break down starch during the malting process, but if the grain is too big, the ratio of enzymes is not sufficient to complete the malting process in an economic time (of about six days).

With the need to conform to numerous traditional and contemporary criteria, and with 18 million Australian connoisseur’s scrutinising their every move, barley breeders are perhaps the most deserving of the final product of their labours at the end of the working day.