The Troegs Lollihop DIPA you enjoy starts as grain in the field, in this case, the field managed by Lloyd Gottshall in Royersford Montgomery County. From the field, the raw grain comes to us at Double Eagle, also in Montgomery County, then travels back to Hershey to mash in.
The delivery on the trailer is 12,000 lb of Rustic Ale malt, our English style pale ale, upon which Troegs’ Lollihop recipe was developed in 2017. This is the first batch of malt made from the new malting barley variety, Avalon, developed by the small grains breeding program at Virginia Tech. We are very excited to transition to this new grain that was developed specifically for our Mid-Atlantic growing climate.
The shift to Avalon has been a welcome event, one we have been anticipating for years. Until Avalon was developed, there were very few viable 2-row malting barley varieties available for our growing region, and most of those came from European seed. Some have performed better than others, but none has been ideal. Even as we were planning our malthouse in 2014, we were aware that Virginia Tech’s small grains breeding program was developing a new variety, and now 10 years later, it’s finally here.