Which barley varieties are used for whisky?

Whisky is made from malted barley, and in Scotland that almost always comes from a short list of malting barley varieties approved for malt distilling, with Laureate as the largest.

On the AHDB Recommended List for spring barley 2026/27, five varieties have full approval for malt distilling: Laureate, LG Diablo, KWS Sassy, Firefoxx and SY Tennyson. A second group has provisional approval, including Belter, SY Arrow, Firecracker, Ptarmigan, KWS Enduris and Olsen. Four varieties are still under test, including Trailblazer, Roulette, Shona and Nolan. Concerto and Optic, for years well-known names in brewing barley, are no longer on that list.

How much of a variety is sown shows in the purchase figures of the Maltsters Association of Great Britain. Laureate accounted for 73.4 percent of all British spring malting barley bought from the 2025 harvest. Among winter barley, Craft was the largest at 42.5 percent, a variety with full approval for brewing. A handful of varieties therefore fill almost the entire field.

If you want to know which variety a particular bottle is made from, the label is rarely the answer. Only distilleries that deliberately make a point of it put a variety name on the bottle.

Malting barley is barley of a variety approved for malting that meets a nitrogen and moisture specification. A batch outside those limits is not accepted as malting barley.

The Malting Barley Committee assigns a status to each variety, and that status applies per use: brewing, malt distilling or grain distilling. The levels are full approval, provisional approval and under test. A variety can have full approval for brewing and not yet for malt distilling, as is the case with Skyway and RGT Planet. Approval is also no purchase guarantee: the maltsters themselves note that growers should first consult their buyer before sowing a new variety.

Besides the variety, the composition of the lot counts. The maltsters are buying about 1.4 million tonnes from the 2026 harvest, divided into nitrogen classes: below 1.65 percent, 1.66 to 1.85 percent and above 1.85 percent. Delivery is at a maximum of 14.5 percent moisture, unless agreed otherwise. Many approved varieties are two-row, such as Craft and Buccaneer.

Agronomic traits count in the choice. For Nolan and SY Arrow the maltsters note that they give a low specific weight.

Alcohol yield per tonne is the yardstick by which the variety list compares malting barley varieties with each other, and so the yardstick on which maltsters and distillers base their choice.

The AHDB list of spring barley varieties has, for each variety, a column called predicted spirit yield, expressed in liters of pure alcohol per tonne. There are also columns for hot water extract in liter degrees per kilo, for nitrogen content in percent, and for the crop's grain yield in the field. A variety that gives more alcohol per tonne of malt needs less malt for the same amount of spirit. That is a calculation across the whole chain, from field to still.

Yield is therefore the reason the varieties change so quickly. A new variety that yields more and resists disease better displaces the previous one within a few harvest years. That is how names that had long been on the list disappeared, while Laureate took almost three quarters of British spring brewing barley within a few years.

Taste is not a column on that list. The variety list assesses yield, disease resistance, extract and nitrogen, and gives no taste assessment per variety.

The evidence for a noticeable difference between varieties is limited. In controlled research on new make spirit, the growing site weighed more heavily than the variety itself.

Researchers compared two barley varieties, Olympus and Laureate, from two Irish locations, Athy in county Kildare and Bunclody in county Wexford, from the 2017 and 2018 harvest years. They made new make spirit from them on a laboratory scale. The result: environment and the interaction between variety and environment had more influence than the variety alone. The variety on its own gave a significant difference on only two sensory characteristics per year.

The limits of that study are firm. It involved two varieties with a related genetic background, two locations, two seasons and panels of six assessors. The locations differed at the same time in soil, pH and weather, so which factor exactly had an effect cannot be separated out. Cask maturation was not examined in that trial.

So little can be said with certainty about the relationship between variety and the other factors. Cask, yeast and distillation were not weighed against the variety in this trial, and whether a difference in variety in the new make survives the years in cask was not measured in this study.

A single-variety bottling is whisky made from a named barley variety, often an old landrace such as bere, which distillers use in small batches alongside the standard malting barley.

According to the Agronomy Institute of the University of the Highlands and Islands, bere is a very old landrace grown in the north of Scotland, especially on Orkney, and is regarded as the oldest grain to have been grown commercially without interruption in the far north of Great Britain. The institute also calls bere important as a genetic resource for plant breeding.

In practice these are small volumes. Since 2006 an Orkney chain has supplied roughly 50 tonnes of bere a year to Bruichladdich distillery, which made a series of single malts from it; the first, from Orkney bere, came out in 2014. Isle of Arran Distillers used roughly 19 tonnes of Orkney bere in a trial project for two limited bottlings, released in 2012 and 2014. Next to the roughly 1.4 million tonnes of brewing barley that the maltsters buy per harvest, these are very small lots.

The motive is distinction and research. Bruichladdich found that spirit from bere had properties that differed from those of modern varieties, and a landrace yields too little to fill ordinary production.

Under the Scotch Whisky Regulations 2009, single malt Scotch whisky may only be made from water and malted barley, with no other grains, distilled in batches in pot stills at a single distillery.

For Scotch whisky in general, the regulation stipulates that it is distilled at a distillery in Scotland from water and malted barley, to which only whole grains of other cereals may be added, and that fermentation takes place at that same distillery by adding yeast. Distillation is at less than 94.8 percent alcohol. Maturation is only allowed in oak casks of at most 700 litres, for at least three years, and the bottle must contain at least 40 percent alcohol.

Nowhere in those conditions is a variety name stated. The law sets requirements for the type of grain, barley, and for the malting, not for the variety, and so the variety name is not something the legislator considers belongs on the label. The Scotch Whisky Association gives the same category description in its guidance for bottlers and producers and likewise mentions neither varieties nor variety testing.

We are happy to discuss questions about a particular bottling in our shop in Bathmen, where the whole whisky department holds 4,024 items from 587 brands within a range of about 6,500 items. We do not sell alcohol to anyone under 18.