Can organic be sustainable?
By Dave Burdick and Kenan Davis
David Quinn would like to make more beer, but he can’t.
“I asked for 3,000 pounds and only got 1,800. So we’re being actually physically limited by our supply of hops,” said Quinn, 29, co-founder of Pisgah Brewing Company. The brewery is housed in a nondescript warehouse just north of Asheville, N. C., and currently produces about 100 kegs a week.
The beer industry is experiencing a worldwide hops shortage, and brewers are scrambling for the little green cones that give beer its distinctive bitterness and aroma.
Multiple factors have converged to shine a spotlight on hops, a small but essential ingredient in beer. The 1990s saw an oversupply of hops, leading to a reduction in hops acreage as farmers converted to more profitable crops. Bad weather across Europe damaged crop yields. A fire at a warehouse in Yakima, Wash., last year destroyed about 5 percent of the U.S. supply, which accounts for one-fourth of the world’s hops.
Obtaining organic hops is nearly impossible. An already limited availability is exacerbated by the rising demand for organic products, as big brewers are muscling their way into a segment dominated by craft brewers.
Last year, Anheuser-Busch released two organic beers, Stone Mill Pale Ale and Wild Hop Lager. When you look at how consumers are spending their money, it’s not hard to see why. Sales for organic beer grew from 19 million in 2005 to 25 million in 2006, at a gross rate of 29 percent, according to the Organic Trade Commission.
Anheuser-Busch’s entry drastically cut short sources for organic ingredients, leaving small brewers in the lurch. “Anheuser-Busch made two organic brews and knocked out all the organic hops,” said Samuel Merritt, president of Civilization of Beer, a company that promotes beer education.
The ripple effect of Big Beer’s presence has ruffled some feathers and invited some territorial sniping.
“They should just stay out of the craft beer industry,” Quinn said. “They would sell more if they would just put it in a green can and call it ‘OG Bud’.”
Quinn’s Pisgah Brewing Company has been producing organic beer, certified by the North Carolina Crop Improvement Association, since it opened and sold its first keg of Pisgah Pale Ale in 2005 to Barley’s Taproom in downtown Asheville.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture says that a product must consist of 95 percent organically produced products to be labeled “USDA Organic,” allowing for 5 percent of non-organic products that are not commercially available in organic form. These products are put on exemption list.
In response to the shortage of organic hops, the U.S. Department of Agriculture put hops on the exemption list, meaning they could be included in a product labeled with the green “USDA Organic” seal. But hops make up a slim percentage of what actually goes into a beer. An average beer is made up of about 95 percent water and 5 percent alcohol. The wiggle room between the “about” 95 percent and the 5 percent is where you’ll taste the flavor of hops.
Since federal rules allowed non-organic hops in certified organic beer, Quinn can keep Pisgah’s purchases within the U.S. And it goes beyond just ingredients. While cleaning up before a brewery tour, he walked over to a recently purchased handcart sitting against the cement wall and pointed to a sticker that said “Made in America.”
“We buy all our ingredients from North America and as much equipment as we can,” Quinn said. “Buy it either used or make sure it’s made in the States or at least North America to reduce the overall carbon footprint of everything we’re doing. We want local people to support us so we gotta support local people, and it would be counter to the philosophy to import.”
The predicament of supply shortages calls into question the sustainability of going organic when it requires products to travel great distances.
“It’s certainly less sustainable when you look at the overall picture and realize that certain things are brought to new locations over great distances - so you have a higher carbon footprint,” said Amelia Slayton, co-founder of Seven Bridges Cooperative, an organic ingredient supply business. But, in the long-term, she said, “Organic brewing is more sustainable because it is approaching farming the land in a way that will renew the agricultural resource for generations to come instead of depleting nutrients from the soil and contaminating groundwater.”
There is a careful balance to be struck when aiming for being both organic and sustainable.
“Organic does not necessarily mean sustainable,” said Paul Gatza, director of the Brewers Association, which is a non-profit devoted to brewing. “Transportation and energy remain factors. Organic, when coupled with renewable energy and local sourcing and an emphasis on draft beer sales, approaches a higher sustainability profile.”
Pisgah controls transportation and energy costs by staying small, with a focus on making enough beer to meet only local demand.
“It goes with our philosophy to stay small, have high quality,” Quinn said. “And by staying small we can be really efficient and don’t have to distribute very far - and keep our environmental impact on the community low.”
Sometimes Quinn receives calls requesting Pisgah’s beer outside of its distribution range.
“When people outside of our area want our beer, I tell them to come visit Asheville, because it’s a beautiful town in the fall,” he said.