Conscious Choice: The Clean, Green Buzz

March 2006 | Choice Eating

The Clean, Green Buzz

We’re talking organic beer here, not the dyed green brew you get on St. Paddy’s Day

By Traci Hukill

When you think about the average Joe indulging in the great American ritual of pizza and beer, you don’t necessarily conjure up a vision of a health- or ecology-minded individual.

But that’s changing as the beer market gets hip to organic beer. This follows the trend of the public, which has steadily warmed to organic goods over the last decade, buying them up at an increase of about 20 percent a year since 1997.

If the Organic Trade Association is to be believed, by 2025 the average American household will spend 14 percent of its budget on organic products. Including, of course, beer.

Organic beer is “a very steady business,” says Greg Hall, brewmaster of Chicago-based Goose Island, which in January 2000 added to its conventional brews the organic Lamar St. Pale Ale, made exclusively for Whole Foods. “What I’ve heard in the market in Chicago is there are more restaurants in particular that are asking for an organic beer. We don’t have one now. We’re considering how to best address that.”

The Northwest chapter of the Master Brewers Association of the Americas chose “organic beer” as the focus of its annual meeting last fall, although to hear most organic brewers tell it, they’re late to the party. Apparently Americans have already developed a nigh-unslakable thirst for eco-friendly brews.

“We went from 1,800 barrels in 1998 to 8,000 barrels last year,” says Morgan Wolaver, who started Wolaver’s Certified Organic Ale in Santa Cruz in 1997 before going on to buy Otter Creek Brewing and relocate to Vermont in 2002. The top-selling organic brand, Wolaver’s now sells in the Northeast, the mid-Atlantic and the West Coast. “The demand is definitely there.”

Representatives from Anheuser-Busch reportedly visited the Butte Creek Brewing Co. in Chico, Calif. a few months ago, to investigate the possibility of starting a line of organic beers. None of the brewers who now dominate the tiny organic beer market are panicking, but the thought of competition from the King of Beer is cause for some concern.

However, Goose Island’s Hall is skeptical about the willingness of a giant like Budweiser to go through the certification process. “I would think (for) a company that big and a brewery that complex, it would be a pretty big deal,” he says.

“It would be interesting to see,” muses Lyle Morse, president of Olympia, Wash.-based Fish Brewing Co., which produces Wild Salmon Organic Pale Ale and several other organic brews in addition to a nonorganic line. “Will they just take your market away or bring a huge market awareness with them?”

Butte Creek is also growing by leaps and bounds, and is poised to add five states this summer to the 21 in which it already distributes.

But the brand with perhaps the farthest geographical reach is Goose Island’s Lamar St. Pale Ale. Whole Foods, which carries the beer (named for the Austin boulevard where the chain was born) stocks the organic brew in its stores in 31 states.

Going Organic

Matt Brynildson, who was brewmaster at Goose Island the first time it brewed organically, says it was mainly a matter of finding sources of organic malted barley and hops. Otherwise, things stayed pretty much the same. “We already used no preservatives or additives,” he says. “It was mostly just sourcing and keeping the raw materials separate from the nonorganic, and validating all that.”

In fact, he thinks beer brewers are naturally inclined toward the values the organic industry represents. For one thing, many brewers abide by the strict German brewing law known as the Reinheitsgebot. That puts them in a traditionalist frame of mind that eschews things like genetically modified grains. “Certainly the craft brewers have stayed a pretty purist group,” says Brynildson, now brewmaster at Firestone Walker in Paso Robles, Calif.

Jim Crooks, quality control manager for Firestone Walker Brewing Company samples beer from a barrel. Firestone Walker is the only brewing company in the U.S. to barrel ferment their ales. Photo: Rob Defoe

But going organic isn’t exactly a cakewalk, especially if a big player like Budweiser joins the game. Wolaver says that could make the supply of organic malting barley tight for a while, although he adds that in the long run “it should be a good thing from the standpoint that more farmers will convert their conventional crops to organic.”

Without exception the brewers said the hardest part about going organic was finding the hops. Turns out it’s notoriously difficult to grow hops in the United States without pesticides because they easily succumb to fungal diseases found here but not elsewhere. Most organic hops are grown in New Zealand, England or Germany and sold at triple the price of conventional hops.

The dried flowers of a vine, hops comprise a tiny fraction by weight of beer’s ingredients, so until now it’s been legal to use conventional hops in organic beer, thanks to some wiggle room in the national organic standard.

That loophole is set to close next year unless the beer industry moves fast to get hops added to a short list of exceptions to the all-organic rule, says Gwendolyn Wyard of the organic certifying organization Oregon Tilth. “I would be surprised if hops don’t find their way onto that list,” she says.

Emily Thomas, who owns Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing with husband Chad Brill and brother Nick Thomas, can’t imagine using conventional hops in their beer. “We don’t have to use organic hops, but they’re so much more fragrant,” she says.

Everyone has a different reason for going organic. Morgan Wolaver’s brother was an organic farmer in Hawaii. Fish Brewing had long supported salmon habitat conservation efforts when it decided to take the plunge. For Thomas and Brill, it was never a choice to not go organic.

Fast Growing

If there’s such a thing as organic beer-brewing royalty, Emily Thomas might be it. Raised in the redwood-shaded Santa Cruz Mountains of California by a hippie mom with a catering business, she naturally gravitated toward natural food stores when she moved to San Diego for college and met Brill. Her uncle, Pat Logan, is one of the founders of Seven Bridges Cooperative Microbrewery in Santa Cruz, a 10-year-old source of organic supplies for homebrewers. Logan taught Thomas how to brew, and she in turn showed Brill, who promptly developed an obsession and a talent.

The couple recently confessed that they’re stunned by their success in the scant 10 months since they sold their first beer out of an industrial park on Santa Cruz’s west side. They didn’t even have labels, just letters on the caps in magic marker: A for amber and so on. Now they’re brewing 120 barrels a month and have been picked up by United Natural Food, a distributor that will take their 22-ounce beers all over the western United States. They’re scrambling to keep up with demand even though they have never marketed.

“People came to us,” says Brill.

They laugh when they remember that they weren’t sure they wanted to put the word “organic” on the label.

“Chad wanted to just put his beer out there without people judging it, like ‘Eww, organic beer,’” Thomas says. “But that’s what does make it unique.”

They compromised by putting the word in small letters on the label. Next time they make labels, they say, “organic” will be in a bigger font.

Traci Hukill is a writer on the West Coast.

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