It is all too easy to forget major food and beverage categories while in the midst of attempting to eat . Some of these products even stare you right in the face but are more often than not overlooked. For me, that category mainly includes adult beverages. I decided I would begin my exploration of how organic versus inorganic alcohol is produced with beer. Given that dozens of new microbreweries seem to pop up every day, I figured there was bound to be a substantial organic beer market.
Conventional Beer Production
The ingredients for brewing beer do not seem complicated at first glance. There are only four ingredients: barley, hops, water, and yeast. The main goal in brewing is to release the sugars from the grain (usually barley, but it can also be wheat, rye, etc.) so that the yeast can turn the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide, thus creating beer. The hops are the green fruit on a vine plant and are bitter, which balances out the sugar in the beer. The hops also act as a natural preservative.1
Once you have the above four ingredients, there are five common steps to follow when making beer. The first step is referred to as malting—once the grains are harvested, they are heated, dried out, and cracked. This malting process isolates the enzymes needed for successful brewing. The second step is mashing. In this step, the cracked grains are put in hot water for an hour, which activates the enzymes and causes the grains to release their sugars. The sticky liquid that now exists is called wort. Third, the wort is boiled for an hour while the brewer adds hops and other spices several times. Fourth, the wort is cooled, strained, and then put in a fermentation container. The yeast, which is the agent that causes the fermentation, is added to the fermentation container. The yeast eventually eats all of the sugar in the wort, producing and alcohol in the process.
Depending on the type of beer, the beer can be stored in the container for a few weeks at room temperature, which you would do for ales, or for many weeks at cold temperatures, which you would do for lagers. After the fermenting process is complete, the beer is ready to be bottled and aged. Aging is important because when the beer comes out of the fermentation container it is alcoholic but it is not yet carbonated. In order for the carbon dioxide to naturally carbonate the beer, the beer has to sit in closed beer bottles for another few weeks, or even another few months.2
Organic Beer Production
So, what is the difference between organic and conventional beer you ask? It turns out that the brewing process described above is the same, but the way that the barley, hops, and any other product that is added for flavor is grown is not. Unlike conventional beer, the ingredients in organic beer are not produced using . Interestingly enough, until January 2013, brewers were allowed to sell beer as “organic” without using organic hops. This exception was largely because organic hops were not widely available.3
https://web.archive.org/web/20160404104221if_/http://www.youtube.com/embed/JY7BlMASMTM iiSo what about supply, how much organic beer is really out there in the marketplace? There answer is not very much. Brewers point to cost and ingredient availability as two main obstacles organic beer producers have to overcome. First, organic produce is often more expensive, meaning brewers either have to make less of a profit or increase the price of their beer, neither of which are ideal situations. Fortunately, prices for items such as organic hops continue to fall as demand rises. While organic hops used to be $20 per pound, compared to non-organic hops at $6-8 per pound, the price for organic has now dropped to $12-18 per pound. Similarly, while the percentage of organic hops out of the total hops grown in the United States was only 0.246% in 2009, it rose to 1.12% in 2012.4
Ingredients are not the only factor to consider when determining the of beer. For instance, the packaging, production, and shipping of beer all use resources. This begs the question: is it better to buy an organic beer brewed in another state or a local, conventional beer? It is worth noting that most of the United States’ barley is grown in only a few states, which means even locally brewed beers are not completely “local.”5
Clearly, the organic beer industry is on the rise, albeit slowly. While it is still hard to track down an organic beer on tap at a bar, markets such as Whole Foods often sell a few options.6 Hopefully in the future, factors such as cost and ingredient availability will become less of an obstacle for brewers who wish to brew organic beer.
To learn more about organic wine, check out another Greeniacs article: 🙂
