WESTERN PRODUCER — There’s nothing more Canadian than rye.
Nor anything more Canadian than Rye.
Rye, the crop, was a staple of most of the farms that first broke the western Canadian soils, feeding horses, cattle, hungry farm families and townfolk with a taste for rye bread.
Rye, the whisky (in this series I’m capitalizing “rye” when I refer to the drink as opposed to the crop), calmed many a frazzled prairie farmer’s nerves, gave birth in rural Saskatchewan to the world’s greatest liquor dynasty and became a hallmark of Canada on the global stage.
Indeed, the most tangible experience of Canada for millions of people overseas has been imbibing “Canadian” whisky, which they believe is synonymous with “Rye.”
(It’s not, but most people don’t realize that. More on this in coming weeks.)
I’ve wanted to write a series on rye and Rye for years, with this “Canadian-ness” element combining itself in my mind with my fears for the loss of Western Canada’s small acreage crops, such as rye. Then there’s the fact that — like so many other men — when I turned 50 I switched from drinking wine to sipping whisky. The patriot in me wants to celebrate rye and Rye as both Canadian and prairie and my occasional tipple as a statement of loyalty to our nation.
A year ago, when I began working on this, I thought I would be writing about a dying crop, fading from Western Canada’s farm fields, and the ugly duckling of the whisky world, eclipsed by Scotch and fancier liquors.
As I’ve talked to farmers and seed growers, distillers and marketers, breeders and drinkers, I’ve happily discovered I was dead wrong about the situation of both rye and Rye today.
Rye, the crop, is on the cusp of a bounce-back, finding a place with many growers, and new varieties available or on the horizon. New growers are piling into the old crop.
And Rye has entered the fancy liquor forum, with the word no longer seen as synonymous with cheap booze nor associated with bootlegger quality.
This series won’t be the nostalgia-laced, mournful eulogy to rye and Rye I feared. After doing a couple of dozen interviews and much reading, it feels like it might help herald the rebirth of the crop and the whisky, which those growing and drinking the stuff have known about, but which is mostly unknown to the greater world.
Come along with me on this journey, which I’ve just begun, and let’s see where rye and Rye take us.
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