Beer Going Organic, Dude…
Beer and wine are natural products, but they are also products of modern agriculture. This means that somewhere, sometime, during the growth or storage of the raw product, some pesticide or other chemical was likely used to “help” things along. With wine, it is pesticides on the grape crop and then a dose of sulfites right in the must (juice) to stave off wild yeast or bacteria.
Since beer is made chiefly from water, barley (sometimes other grains) and hops (an herb), every ingredient could be susceptible to some form of chemical adulteration. Water is really never an issue in modern breweries. The highest level of water filtration and treatment assure a clean and mineral-balanced supply to meet the recipe. The reason beer continues to remain relatively inexpensive is due to the low cost of the raw materials. Modern barley crops are extremely high yielding and meet the demanding specifications of the brewing industry. The only trouble is that the use of chemicals has been an essential part of this agronomic success story.
Hops are essentially herbs that grow on a vine. They can be overrun easily by pests. It takes a lot of hop vines to produce a meaningful cash crop even though hops are not a cheap ingredient in beer. Believe me! I have grown hops (organically) right here in Charleston and I could only get enough hops cones off of my two vines to make around five gallons of beer. That’s not to say that wasn’t the fault of the grower (I used to have a green thumb, but it wilted and died). For the big boys, however, spraying pesticides on hops has become essential to the business of high-yield hop farming.
Okay, you get the picture! Your beer may have had bad stuff added to it somewhere along the line. Trust me, though, not nearly as much as some of the fruits and vegetables we eat every day.
Enter Organic Beer. I am seeing more and more of this stuff in the offering. Even as a homebrewer, I am able to buy raw organic malted barley, but it costs at least 60 precent more than the poisonous stuff! Do I buy it? No, but I have nothing against the trend. I would guess that these costs should come down as produced volume increases with demand. I am told that only certain hop varieties can make it through the organic growing process and still yield an acceptable crop. Apparently, there is shortage of good aromatic varieties used in the finishing of more flavorful brews. Maybe that is why most of the organic beer I know of is not in the “extreme beer” category, though it seems more and more interesting organic brews are showing up everyday.
Believe it or not, you can actually find a few organic beers right here in the Bud republic! The reason you are able to find Stone Mill Pale ale and Wild Hop lager is due to the fact that they are brewed by our friends at Anheuser-Busch, and you know the saying: “As goes Anheuser-Busch, so goes West Virginia.” Both of these beers offer nothing special and are underwhelming beers even if they are “organic.”
Better organic beers would be Samuel Smith’s Organic Tadcaster ale (which I discussed in my recent review of the Bluegrass Kitchen). Then there a few really nice products from a German brewery called Pinkus. Pinkus Munster Alt is supposed to be an altbier (meaning brewed in the old style). The most famous altbiers are produced and sold in dusseldorf Germany, and are typically amber to brown, and are assertively bitter. This beer is light in color and delivers a slight caramel sweetness that finishes slightly sour; a good beer but not stylistically an altbier. Pinkus Ur-Pils is also a well made beer, but is not as bitter as I would like my German style pilsner to be. Pinkus Organic Hefeweizen is a really nice beer and a good hefeweizen to boot, really great for washing down steroidally grown chicken or banquet brand Salisbury steak (just kidding). I have seen all of the Pinkus products at the Wine Shop in the Capitol Market. I am sure we are going to be seeing more and more organically produced beers in the not too distant future and small craft brewers are leading the charge. My only concern is will be able buy them here in West Virginia?
