Brewers not to buy barley in Europe anymore

The European Radio for Belarus has decided to find out what barley will be used to brew the beer that Belarusians used to drink, drink now and will drink in the future.
“I would like to warn the authorities that they should inform brewers they will not be able to buy barley in Europe anymore. We should get rid of the possibility to bring money abroad instead of buying everything at home…”

The announcement was made by Alyaksandr Lukashenka at the harvesting campaign meeting this week.

A question arises: is our barley good enough to use it for brewing beer? The head of Homel Region Executive Committee confessed that there were some problems with Belarusian barley:

“We got good barley last year. But this year some barley has problems with the protein content”.

ERB decided to turn to a number of Minsk “brewers” to find out what barley was used to brew our beer.

It turned out that the main Belarusian brewery “Krynitsa” used a lot of imported barley. One of the employees noted that we drink beer made from foreign barley even now:

“Now we are using Belarusian barley. But we used to brew from Russian and Ukrainian barley for the past several years. Now we will be using Belarusian barley”.

The “Alivaryya” brewery also used to buy a lot of imported barley. The head of the enterprise Arkadzi Dudzko says that now it is hard to find out what barley is being used to brew their beer:

“There were some quotas last year because there was a bad harvest. We lacked barley and had to buy it in Russia and Ukraine. To tell you the truth, it is difficult to say what barley was used to make the malt”.

Arkadz Dudzko noted that “Alivaryya” would probably continue buying malt abroad:

“Barley will start being harvested only next week and then it will be processed and sampled. Only then we will see how much barley we have and if it is not enough we will have to use alternative variants”.

The “Rakauski Brovar” café that brews its own beer does not trust Belarusian barley for some reason. “Rakauski Brovar” informed us:

“We use only imported barley”.

When we asked if they were going to use Belarusian barley the response was uncertain:

“You know, it is difficult to say.  But it will remain like that for now”.