Disturbing Trends

Two separate stories about hop and barley crops came out this week, and they are something of a brow-furrower.

Hops
World hop yields have been in steady decline for twenty years, down to nearly half the production from 1986-2006. This is due to a number of causes--notably the rise of high-alpha hops, which reduce the quantity needed per barrel, and the steady decline of bitterness in national brands, which still produce the overwhelming majority of beer in the US. After very low prices in the late 90s and early aughts, growers started scrapping acreage which has in turn led to spiking prices and hop shortages:

Prices are the highest they’ve ever been - and it’s beyond comprehension. Cascades were priced at $7/lb. three weeks ago and are currently being quoted at or near $10.00/lb. Willamettes went from $5.50 to $7.00/lb. and may also get to $10/lb.

It takes three years to get to full production on a new hop field, however, we don’t have the number of growers needed to put new acres in (the total of US growers is about 45, down from more than 2000 in 1978. About new 2,000 acres are going in this year - almost all of those are high alpha. The Cascade increase in acreage is 0.

Cascades are, of course, the backbone of Northwest brewing. The upshot is that we'll see increasing experimentation with other varieties of hops as availability drives new recipes. Probably this means greater reliance on high-alpha hops, which may be a downside. The upside may not be all bad, though--it could provoke a new wave of beers.

Barley
Barley crops aren't under the same kind of pressure, but Laurelwood brewer Chad Kennedy sent out an email alerting us to the trouble brewers may be in as a result of global warming.

Due to the worsening climatic conditions it is possible that beer will not be made exclusively from barley, but also for example from chickpea, the Czech biotechnology portal www.gate2biotech.cz has found. The weather fluctuations in the past couple of years, especially the drier and warmer climate in association with extreme downpours have had a catastrophic impact on barley producers....

The brewing and malting research institute in Brno has been exploring the possibilities of utilizing for example chickpea, cowpea or sweatpea for the past year. It is therefore possible that in a few years Czech beer will not be made exclusively from barley malt.

For very different reasons, this could lead to experimentation with malt substitutes, which would definitely change the flavor of beer. (And would the German tradition of reinheitsgebot die? Imagine the horror in Munich!)

Makes a man want to go cry in his beer...