16 varieties in spring barley seed production for 2026

Spring barley varieties are coming thick and fast and most of these are suitable for malting, offer good grain quality and spirit levels. With many now offering high alcohol yields and excellent quality, disease resistance and straw strength it would be great to see more of the new varieties adopted by the malting companies to help tillage enterprises to be more sustainable by reducing inputs and increasing yield potentials.

There are now 16 varieties in seed production, but a number are only in the early stages. Gangway, which has been a favourite for many years has left production. Geraldine takes up 18% of the seed. It has Irina, Planet and Laureate in its parentage and is a high yielder which growers are generally very happy to grow with a KPH of 67.2.

Mermaid is the second biggest variety in seed production, followed by SY Amity, Hurler and Florence. See Table 1 for a breakdown of the seed area.

Mermaid, although it has Planet in its parentage, has been clean of net blotch and has a good KPH at 69. However, it is a variety that needs to be watched for skinning. This can lead to failure at malting intakes and there is little the farmer can do about it.

SY Amity is a high yielder and is a non GN variety suited to distilling. It has good resistance to lodging and handles net blotch well, but is slightly behind on rhynchosporium control.

Hurler and Lollipop have very good disease resistance profiles, with both scoring an eight for resistance to mildew, rhychosporium and net blotch and a six to brown rust.

Florence has good straw characteristics. It’s slightly behind on net blotch control and KPH is in the general running.

Varieties to look out for on KPH are Skyway and Rockway, the highest scores on the list along with Mermaid. Skyway and Rockway come from Drummonds, along with Lollipop, and Unity is another spring barley in trial from the company. Gretchen has 5% of the seed area for 2026 and its good disease profile is attractive.

Spinner was described as a cracking variety by the Department of Agriculture. It has 6% of the seed area for 2026. It has good straw strength and is high-yielding at a relative yield score of 106.

Malting

Laureate and Planet remain in production for malting. While some growers get on okay with these varieties the large majority admit they take too much inputs and while they served them well in their heyday most growers would like to move on from them to more profitable varieties.

Belter

Belter is one of those up-and-coming malting varieties. It is reported to have good predicted spirit levels and the seed currently in production in Wexford was reported to be vigorous and under less stress than other crops in the county.

It scores an eight out of nine for resistance to net blotch and a seven for rhynchosporium and is reported to have good straw.

Fontane

Fontane is another variety to keep an eye out for. There is no seed in production yet, for this brewing variety. Brewers are reported to like this variety that is a little bit earlier than others and comes from the same breeders as Geraldine and Bennett.