SUSTAINABLE BREWING, PT. 4 - MALT & HOPS
Hello again dear victims,
We return to the dreary (but important!) world of sustainable brewing for one more fact-laden post before a decidedly more entertaining finale next week, so god bless you for sticking around, and I hope the following is both reasonably brief and suitably interesting.
Barley and Hops take a considerable amount of water to grow, and transporting vast quantities of these crops across state and country lines may be manageable for now, but the environmental impact of pesticide-reliant farming, the transport of massive amounts of raw ingredients using greenhouse gas-emitting vessels, and the amount of energy currently expanded in kilning hops and malting barley make future access to a broad variety of these plants uncertain.
Further, in times of general shortages of goods (like wartime**), it has been limited access to malt and hops that has had the most profound effect on beer character, and thus this topic, while less addressable by small breweries, may well be of the greatest import to them.
Sustainable Farming
If this were a book, the first chapter would probably provide an overview on the basics of farming, like watering methods, soil preparation, growing seasons, and soil health, but seeing as I’ve never grown so much as a basil plant, we’re going to have to skip all of that white noise and jump straight to the next part: processing barley and hops (which largely entails drying them). You call it a woefully incomplete article, I call it “writing through an authentic lens.”
First, though, we will cover some basics. A common shorthand summary of sustainable farming is the following: “the goal of sustainable agriculture is to meet society’s food and textile needs in the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Indeed, while craft brewers across the United States are free to brew 12% Oreo Stouts and Fiendishly-hopped Hazy IPAs constrained only by their bank accounts, there are concerns about the long-term viability of our level of barley use, for example, both as a food source for livestock and as a brewing grain.
This paper, for example, found that even under a variety of different emissions scenarios, the UK will have to import barley in order to meet demand by the 2050s, even assuming a high future yield (due to technological advancements, presumably), which compounds the issue, since this practice is clearly not as sustainable as growing the barley within the UK. This implicit import of water is called “blue water” in the literature, a term referring to the use of irrigation as a source of water for crops (as opposed to rainwater, for example). Irrigation is, as you’d fairly expect, a significant part of the picture, but due to the scope of the issue, I’ll mention only the following as an example of its far-reaching consequences in hop growing:
“Weeds were historically removed by cultivation, although the switch to a majority of drip irrigation from rill/furrow irrigation in commercial production necessitates different plant spacing, which exacerbates weed problems and has led to the widespread use of herbicides.”
As a final note on the growing side, here’s a second quote from that excellent paper: “an estimated 100% of commercial hop acreage [is] treated with insecticides targeting...pests”
Sustainable Processing
Once you’ve grown your hops and grain, there’s one more step before you can ship them to brewers: drying them out. Hops, for example, are typically 70-80% moisture at harvest, and are dried to around 8%, an order of magnitude. This step is “the most intensive step in hops production and was estimated to have consumed the energy equivalent of 111 million liters of number 2 fuel oil in the 1980 harvest year.” Staggering.
Why do this, particularly given the energy expenditure? There are a few reasons, but chief among them is shelf life. Moisture breeds fairly rapid disease and deterioration, and unless you’re growing your hops and barley, say, a 24 hours’ drive or less from your brew house, you’re stuck drying them out and rehydrating, which actually leads to a subtle inefficiency: these dried hops rehydrate in the boil kettle, absorbing malt-laced wort, which lowers brewhouse efficiency, and every tiny bit of efficiency in a brew house has an environmental impact.
In the case of malt, however, you have no choice - drying the grain is inextricable to the malting process, since this drying halts the biochemical reactions driven by oxygen and moisture in malting. There is, however, a somewhat green angle: if you grow barley near your brewhouse, you don’t need to hit as low a moisture content, and can sun-dry the malt, as was the case with pre-industrial pale beers.
Additionally, some malts are prepared using either elevated kilning temps (for a variety of reasons), or even what amount to coffee roasters, in order to develop sweet or dark flavors, to add character to beers. We’ll discuss the latter below, but it goes without saying that these are energy-intensive processes whose optimization would go a long way.
Finally, you have transportation. As mentioned, the rise of craft brewing in the United States, being driven by homebrewers, has been marked by a dizzying array of styles from virtually every grain-blessed country (Umqumbothi, anyone?), which has meant the regular import of vast quantities of grain and hops from Germany, the UK, Belgium, and more recently for hops, New Zealand and South Africa, for example. Some of these flavor malts are essentially unpurchasable from other sources (Special B, in particular), and are only used in small quantities in beer anyway, but Pilsner malt and british base malts can and have been successfully replicated in the states. The flavors are different, but guns-to-our-heads we could make all of them work. Hops would be trickier, and arguably impossible, to replicate domestically, given the terroir evident in the hops (versus, to a larger degree, kilning technique driving the flavor of malt). For beers with minimal hop loads, like traditional German lagers and British ales, this isn’t a huge deal, but the massive hop loads in Hazy IPAs utilizing hops from New Zealand, for example, is simply not sustainable.
Quoting one last time from that expansive hop paper: [for a particular imperial IPA,] ”hops contribute nearly half of the emissions of barley, which is in stark contrast to literature reports on beers with lower hopping rates, for which the impact of hops is often considered to be negligible.” As to how big of an impact barley has, for reference: “on average, [one group] found that packaging (40%) and raw material production (22%, primarily barley) had the greatest relative carbon footprint [in beer production].” (And a side note: I suspect this to be the reason that pumps have such an outsized impact on energy use, if you remember that note in the last post.)
A Sea of Solutions
Since this problem concerns crops that are grown and processed, brewed with, and then disposed of, it seems natural to lump the following laundry list of solutions into those categories. As mentioned, there are sure to be a million sustainable farming practices that are far outside of my bubble of expertise, but nonetheless, a few came up in research.
Production
Go local, and go organic (but perhaps not non-GMO)
The genetic details of GMOs are beyond my pay grade, but the gist is that they’re genetically fine-tuned varietals that maximize yield and disease resistance. In places with natural rainfall, and who don’t mind some degree of crop loss to pests and disease, that may not necessarily be a sustainability issue, but for places that use aforementioned Blue Water, or use pesticides, those factors are probably worth the “price of admission”
How about the local angle? For us, Admiral Maltings is the local malt choice (and by all reports, quite the malting operation!) and, fortunately, Washington hop farms are the closest large-scale hop-growers. Local means less fuel, and that’s the whole play (since anything that’s not within the state is probably too far for wet hops even once a year, say)
New York takes this to an extreme with a very generous (and possibly unconstitutional? Under the dormant commerce clause, vis a vis out-of-state maltsters?) “Farm Brewing” license, that requires a certain percentage of the raw ingredients used to come from NY state itself (since NY produces stunningly, high quality Barley, Hops, and Apples; they’ve been doing so for a few hundred years, in point of fact)
Could a “vertical” farm, like a hydroponics facility, work?
Probably not. In the research I did, the prevailing opinion was that the massive amount of space that both barley and hops take up make them inefficient from a vertical farming perspective
But, you could change the grain itself - link
Barley has two crops per year, a winter crop and a spring crop
So if you could find or produce a perennial barley strain, you could get more crops per year, increasing land use (and water?) efficiency
But, since that may take some time, in the meantime, more genetic tuning (disease resistance, yield, the usual suspects) seems like the best play
How about kilning?
There may be some modest ability to reduce water and power use, or the source of power at least, but given the highly inextricable nature of malting and kilning schedules and malt flavor (see, for example, Pilsner vs Munich malt, or Floor malting), I don’t see this field changing substantially, aside from the adoption of electricity
Use in Brewing
Roasted Barley - link
It should come as no surprise that malt roasting tech was...borrowed from the coffee world, and as such, it may be the coffee scene that once again updates roasters
Traditionally, 75% of a roaster’s energy leaves through the chimney; that’s abysmal
Part of the problem is that, in order to eliminate some of the viler compounds that result from roasting, I remember a Blue Bottle rep telling me that as much as half of a roaster’s energy is used to fire an “afterburner” whose sole job it is to burn off smokey compounds
A new design knocks out 80% of natural gas usage in such a roaster by eliminating the use of an afterburner, and pulling other tricks
Roasted barley isn’t a huge percentage of many grits, but something like 8% of Guinness’s grist is roasted barley, so any advantage here helps (let alone Schwarzbiers)
Alternative grain sources
For decades, the British used non-barley sugars as a pretty considerable portion of their grists (upward of 25% in some cases); the Belgians still use a bit of sugars in their higher ABV beers
This isn’t always viable, but the use of beets from cane or, more likely, beets may be a viable alternative to barley for even as little as 5% of a grain bill, should that turn out to be more efficient (the amount of research I feel I should do for this article would take years)
Or, heck, you could do as the egyptians did (more or less), and use a grain source that’s both free, and going to waste anyway, namely stale bread. The efficiency isn’t too great, I hear, but who cares! It’s free fermentables
The obvious - lower the ABV
Per this article, “Overall, there is a rule of thumb suggesting that the higher the alcoholic content of a drink, the greater its carbon footprint,” so, yeah, we could just brew lower ABV beer. Interestingly, as we’ll see next week, cask ales are pretty much sustainable unicorns in the vast number of ways in which they, very simply and in largely low-tech ways, minimize energy use, water use, CO2 use, refrigeration use, to some degree grain and hop use, etc. And there’s the tie in! Grab King’s Taxes today, and feel good about it!
Post-Brewing Use
Alaskan’s grain boiler/furnace
As we discussed last time, Alaskan has started using their spent grain as a fuel source for a new boiler. Neato!
Food for humans
Not only is spent grain commonly used as a food source for farm animals (so common, in fact, that it’s not getting its one bullet point), but there’s probably enough nutrition in there for people, too
Brooklyn Brew Shop has a litany of such recipes - link
Other re-use
Here’s a fun one: 6-pack holders made out of barley straw - link
I saw an article about paper wine bottles too, but beer’s need for a pressure-holding vessel probably makes that a wine-specific idea
Harvesting dry hops - link
Hops were first added (or, first gained serious traction) due to their antimicrobial effects, and interestingly, “spent” hop oils are apparently fairly effective “repellent[s] of insect food spoilers,” the idea being to reprocess spent dry hops in particular as a preservative. Wild.
Other things
I didn’t feel it necessary to devote an extra article to the odds and ends of sustainability, so I’ve lumped those all here. These have nothing to do directly with hops and malt, in other words
Steam sanitization - link
Steam is a super effective sanitizer, and given the need for nearly sterile hoses, fermenters, kegs, and so on, and the current practice of using chemicals to achieve this end, steam presents a promising (and pretty old school) alternative
It can be used, for example, in bottles, tanks, and foeder sanitizing; realistically, virtually any surface in a brewery that isn’t plastic can probably be sanitized as well as chemically (or better) with steam
Best yet, for wooden barrels, for example, it takes less than a gallon of water per barrel! It’d be hard for a small brewery, maybe impossible, to beat that with sanitizing solution or any other solution that fills the barrel (perhaps 30 barrels per run is the tipping point, and I don’t think you could get away with using cleaning solution for 30 gnarled barrels in a row)
Re-using bottles - link
As mentioned in the “Cans vs Bottles” post, bottles are a touch worse for the planet than cans, but only if aluminum cans are recycled, making actively recycled bottles the vastly better choice given the industry’s reliance, particularly on the small scale, on “virgin” aluminum
Double mountain brewing has a system where they reuse thicker, sturdier glass bottles, which can be used up to 40 times
Oh, and yeast!
I didn’t include yeast in this post’s thrust, because, for example, yeast can be repitched for, say, 10 batches in a row, and historically breweries would repitch basically in perpetuity (why not do that now? Flavor stability and consistency), so whatever tiny role yeast has in this picture could be immediately resolved. They do produce CO2 when fermenting, but that can be recaptured and used for carbonation and purging vessels of air, etc. - whether or not carbonated drinks are sustainable or good is a question I won’t even pose, since the obvious alternative to brewing beer is to...not brew beer.
So, honestly, there’s not much to be done here! Flocculant, high-attenuation yeasts would be a touch better than your average strain (for packaging and malt efficiency reasons), but then again, would you trade balance and body for .2% ABV and an extra 3% efficiency? That's the question, so maybe yeast won't change at all, or much at any rate
Lagers take more yeast, though, so a possible shift to more ales may be coming, or the use of Kölsch or clean Kveik yeasts in breweries who don't strictly need a fantastic lager
I just brewed one such beer, and I’m blown away. It’s not a true lager, quite obviously, but it is delightful
And then there’s what I like to call some next level insane shit
You know those gelatinous food spheres in high end dining? You can put yeast in those
One insane NY distillery did exactly that, and for vodka production, it worked an absolute treat
This could be interesting for faster, and hence more energy-efficient, brewing on a medium-to-large scale
A final note on these solutions, which is meant to act as a deliberate bit of foreshadowing: all of these solutions are great, but any of them are better than nothing, and it’s up to us as brewers, consumers, and voters to push ourselves, our favorite breweries, and our brewing law makers (elected officials) to pave and walk this sustainable road.
Conclusion
By now, two things should be clear: I was an absolute bloody fool to take on this massive topic in the context of this weekly blog, and sustainable brewing is a fiendishly, wildly, insanely massive topic. Brewing is, we so often forget, an industrial manufacturing process, drawing on large amounts of raw ingredients from three countries, all non-contiguous land masses, and employing a series of biological, chemical, and physical processes to create a food-safe intoxicant to within pretty tight tolerances. So no wonder, if you look at one switch you notice a dozen more, whether you’re thinking about financial efficiency, flavor, or environmental impact. But by now, we both have a much firmer understanding of the big picture, and next week we can wrap it all up by discussing what craft breweries can do now and in the future to ensure that they’re on the right side of history.
Cheers,
Adrian “The Librarian” Febre