Guarding the Brew: Researchers, Farmers, and Brewers Collaborate to Protect Beer Against Climate Change

Tractors plowed over Gayle Goschie’s farm this fall on a sunny day, an hour outside of Portland, Oregon. Goschie is a fourth-generation hops grower in the brewing industry. Her agricultural crew has been preparing barley seeds by the bucketful and adding winter barley, a relatively new crop in the brewing business, to their rotation recently. Fall is the off-season, when the trees are naked.

The Willamette Valley is recognized for producing hops, but as a result of human-caused climate change, the region’s weather patterns and water availability are changing. As a result, Goschie will need to find innovative ways to maintain their output and provide it to both smaller and larger brewers.

Climate change “was not coming any longer,” according to Goschie; rather, it had arrived.

Hops and barley, two important beer crops, are already facing difficulties from producers; these obstacles are expected to worsen due to climate change. Growers of barley and hops in the United States claim that excessive heat, drought, and erratic growing seasons have already had an effect on their harvests. By including winter barley into the mix and developing superior hop types that can tolerate drought, researchers are collaborating with producers to help mitigate the consequences of more unpredictable weather patterns.

Climate change will impact beer production, as scientists have long understood, according to Mirek Trnka, a professor at the Global Change Research Institute. In recent research simulating the impact of climate change on hops, he and his colleagues published their findings in Nature Communications last month. They predicted that by 2050, yields across Europe would drop by four to eighteen percent. His current report bears a similar warning as his first hops research from 15 years ago.

“We’re going to lose things that we think aren’t sensitive to climate change or related, like beer, if we don’t take action,” he said.

The fact that academics are beginning to recognize that climate change is happening more quickly than we may think indicates that there may be opportunities for adaptation and solutions in the form of adjustments to farming practices, but Trnka remains concerned.

The loss of hops in Europe has implications for American producers as well.

One craft brewery that sources some of its hops from Goschie stated that, as a result of the recent hot and dry summers affecting their reliance on hops from Europe, the firm is attempting to reproduce the characteristics of German hops using new types produced in the United States.

Shaun Townsend, an associate professor and senior researcher at Oregon State University, explained that this is the reason some researchers are working on hop varieties that can better tolerate summer heat, warmer winters, altering pests and diseases, and less snowfall, which might imply less irrigation available. Townsend’s approach involves stressing hops during a drought in order to eventually produce more drought-tolerant cultivars.

It’s a laborious process that can take ten years to complete, and it must take into account flavor and yield—the two most important factors to brewers. But he said that people are aware of the potential of running out of water.

While improved hops technology is still in its infancy, barley advancements are already well on their way. According to Kevin Smith, an agronomy and plant genetics professor at the University of Minnesota, winter barley—planted in the fall and kept on fields during the coldest months of the year—might be more practical in the Midwest now that other varieties of barley have been abandoned in favor of less hazardous crops because of climate, plant disease, and economic considerations. Spring barley is the predominant variety for the American beer industry.

Craft breweries that have been highlighting local ingredients and prefer something grown nearby could also find winter barley appealing.

Additionally, it may be produced as a cover crop, which allows farmers to plant it in the off-season when fields are often bare in order to reduce erosion, enhance soil health, and retain carbon stored in the ground.

On the promise of winter barley, however, opinions haven’t always been in full agreement. Smith related a tale about his forebear, a seasoned spring barley producer. He was hearing from Oregon State University professor Patrick Hayes, another scientist, about his aspirations for winter barley. On a business card, Smith’s predecessor expressed his steadfast conviction that winter barley wasn’t worth the hassle by writing, “It can’t be done.”

Hayes has made it his life’s goal to improve winter barley and has preserved the card in his office.

According to Ashley McFarland, vice president and technical director of the American Malting Barley Association, there are already winter barley initiatives in almost every state in the US. Although she believes that winter barley will never account for the whole crop in the United States, she does believe that growers will need to diversify their risk in order to increase their resistance to climatic shocks.

The two largest beer companies in the United States, Molson Coors and Anheuser-Busch, release yearly environmental reports in which they make promises to source hops and barley responsibly and to use less water. However, neither company answered an Associated Press request for comment on the specifics of those efforts.

A senior professor at Cornell who teaches a beer course, Douglass Miller, noted that hops may be a fussy crop in terms of the environment and that beer couldn’t be made without water. The effects of climate change on the supply chain, he said, may drive up the price of beer, but that would also drive up the cost of everything else on the menu. “This has an effect on all beverage categories,” he stated.

Climate change may have an impact on the products available to beer enthusiasts in the future, regardless of what growers and businesses do with hops and winter barley.

“As plant breeders, it will become more and more challenging to provide new barley and hops varieties that can withstand the horrors of the climate change process,” according to Hayes. “And the reason I say terror is because of that volatility, which is really, really scary.”