What is organic?
See, we were hoping you wouldn’t ask that. There’s this document, right? It’s over 500 pages long — long enough that when the government links to it, they use the words “View Entire Standards” — and it’s how the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Organic Program (NOP) determines whether producers like farmers can call their crops organic.
So here’s the short version:
From the USDA:
Organic farming systems rely on ecologically based practices such as cultural and biological pest management, exclusion of all synthetic chemicals, antibiotics, and hormones in crop and livestock production.
Sweet! The holy grail of organic definitions! So sweet and simple and to the point! But. You know, there are a lot of ins and outs. A lot of facets.
If you see the seal pictured here, it means that an accredited certifying agent — someone licensed by the government as opposed to employed by the government — has been to the farm(s) where crops in your product — beer — were grown. When they were there, they checked to see that farmers were following those 554 pages of rules and guidelines.
What’s the catch?
Lots of catches (and that’s a big part of why we’re here). Recently — curiously — USDA standards changed to allow a few more (38 to be exact) non-organic ingredients to be included in products labeled as organic. Bizarrely, one of those ingredients was hops.
The result, say objectors like the Organic Consumers Association, is that Anheuser-Busch, a company that launched two beers marketed as organic in 2006, can use non-organic hops in beers marketed as organic. Who cares? Little guys who have been working pretty hard to be legitimately organic and will now be lumped into the same classification as big guys who aren’t working as hard.
One hard-working little guy is Chris O’Brien aka the Beer Activist. He is a part-owner of and board director of Seven Bridges, a cooperative that sells organic brewing supplies including…you guessed it, organic hops! Everyone has a vested interest, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s wrong. On his blog, he posted an article on Lakefront Brewery president Russell Klisch’s response outlining why organic hops should be required in organic beers.
And there are more catches: debated health benefits, cost effectiveness, marketability. It’s a long list of issues that stem from the question “what is organic?” and from there it’s muddied up a bit — as are many things, we’ve learned — by beer. Stick with us as we try to sort it out.
October 4th, 2007 at 7:10 pm
Howdy,
I’m love to see this new blog about my two favorite things: drinking beer and saving the world!
The hops issue is complex and I’d like to share some additional information. You’re mistaken about the rules being changed to allow 38 new ingredients that are non-organic. These ingredients were allowed to be non-organic before. So the new rule isn’t allowing what was once organic to be non-organic. Non-organic hops, in particular, have always been allowed in beer labeled USDA organic.
The rule change was a two fold deal. The main change was a positive one. It used to be that 5% of ingredients in products labeled USDA organic were allowed to be non-organic. That 5% exemption was recently removed. That’s a good thing. At the same time, 38 ingredients were proposed to be exempted so that the removal of the 5% rule wouldn’t totally kill a bunch of products that rely on a few non-organic ingredients. Beer was one of those products. Organic hops are, in fact, relatively hard to come by. I wrote a whole article about this in the current issue of American Brewer, which I’ll post to my blog as soon as the issue hits the stands.
My simplified view on this subject is that the brewers committed to organic need to band together and stimulate a domestic supply of organic hops so that over the next several years we have the supply needed to satisfy demand, and then hops should be removed from the exemption list.
Yours in GreenGrog,
Chris O’Brien, Beer Activist