Is Organic Better? Part 2

Organic is the new buzzword of the brewing industry. Brewers are rushing to develop new organic ales, and some new brewers are striving for full certification and status of all their products. Mother Earth is happier, people are drinking cleaner and healthier beers, and all is right with the world. But how do they compare in taste to otherwise conventional products?

Organic brewing has been embraced by both large and small brewers. Anheuser-Busch launched its own line of organic beers in 2006 under the names of Green Valley Brewing Company and Crooked Creek Brewing Company. Many independent craft brewers have begun operating with wholly organic ingredients and methods, including Butte Creek Brewing Company of Chico, California, and the longstanding Otter Creek (Wolaver’s) Brewing in Middlebury, Vermont.

Some craft brewers are adding organic products to their otherwise conventional portfolios, such as Green Lakes Organic Ale from Deschutes Brewery of Bend, Oregon. Specialty events such as the North American Organic Brewers Festival are now held regularly. The movement is mature enough that some organic craft brewers have already come and gone, such as the now defunct Healthy Brew out of Fort Worth, Texas.

The organic moniker is not truly a distinct style of beer, as it could apply to any style of beer brewed under these standards. But what has been seen so far in the marketplace are generally mainstream ales such as pale ales, ambers and the occasional mild IPA. This is to be expected for two primary reasons: First, these styles are simple and easy to obtain organic ingredients for and to produce, making them preferable test-market vehicles for a consumer sector still finding its legs. Second, some more complex styles may include ingredients that are not as easy to obtain or as favorably performing as those that fall under the organic umbrella.

For example, roasted malt requires an additional step beyond simple pale malt, that of roasting to obtain a desired color and flavor profile much like coffee beans. This can only add to the expense of an organic malt with its additional handling and processing. Likewise, some adjuncts like Belgian candy sugars or fruit additives may also be more expensive if not more difficult to obtain in organic form, especially for industrial levels of production. It makes sense that brewers would keep this specialty simple at the start.

The primary flaw with organic beers is that many brewers begin with the organic part instead of the beer part. Many organic brewers have either failed outright or produce lackluster beers because they are more focused on meeting ethical and legal standards for organic certification rather than what they should be—that is, brewing a flavorful, competitive beer. For established brewers, a single organic product may be more a reaction to a competitive marketplace than a philosophical choice.

Overall, most organic beers fall short of their “nonorganic” competitive counterparts. From a flavor standpoint, their afterthought status or shortcomings of new and enthusiastic brewers result in (at best) plain and (at worst) dismal beers. The added expense of organic ingredients, as well as the cost of formal certification or membership in organic consortia, can often drive the prices of organic beers beyond what a highly competitive marketplace will bear.

This is not to say that high-quality organic beers cannot be made, nor that companies that make them cannot thrive. Otter Creek has survived since 1998 producing a portfolio of certified organic beers, now distributed coast to coast. Organic beers have won awards, both in their own categories and in direct competition with conventional products. But the brewers must remain focused on producing the best beer possible without sacrificing quality in the name of certification.

Is Organic Better? Part 1

One of the latest trends to hit the U.S. marketplace is the offering of organically produced food, and craft beer is no exception. The rise in sales of organic beers has been meteoric in recent years, with annual jumps in the 40% range based on sales. But is this about a conscientious product or about marketing? Are organic beers better tasting or healthier than “regular” beers?

Being organic can mean different things to different people. For most breweries, there is only their word and reputation that the products advertised as “organic” actually are, and I have no reason to believe otherwise. Some are sanctioned by organic-foods organizations such as the Organic Trade Organization and adhere to their (nonbinding) requirements. The only law in the United States for such products is certification from the USDA National Organic Program, which is a legally enforceable award.

Fundamentally, organic beers are those brewed strictly using source ingredients (primarily malt and hops) that are produced without the application of artificial chemicals for the purpose of herbicide, insecticide or fertilizer. The USDA’s certification allows some commercial leeway as it only requires that 95% of the ingredients be produced with these methods. These requirements have also been extended to include the use of genetically modified organisms (GMO) as ingredients.

The Green Movement has taken hold of many industries, and brewing is no different. Brewers and producers of brewing ingredients are working in many ways to upgrade their standards of production, storage and delivery. Some do this out of a motivation for better products, some for moral and ethical reasons, and some upgrades are solely in the name of efficiency and for financial benefit. Many times, it is a combination of these reasons.

Long past are the days of crop dusting with DDT. Many industrial farms are now using more green solutions for their day-to-day operations, not to pursue any organic status but simply out of a concern for the environment and to yield a better product. Fertilizers are less toxic and more bio-friendly than they have been in years past. Hop farmers are today more likely to use predatory insects to control pests than chemical insecticides. Craft breweries are now often models of green efficiency, integrating recycling and environmentally friendly practices with wastewater and chemicals as standard practice.

One issue particular to the brewing industry is that beers are not simply grown from the soil. It is comparatively simple to refrain from using nonorganic additives on crops, or to easily substitute one agent for another greener equivalent. But beer is an industrial product, and some portions of its production require otherwise questionable compounds. Water must be cleaned and filtered and, in some cases, chemically treated for proper pH levels advantageous to fermentation. Sanitizers must be used with every step after the boil, as the same environment in which the yeast flourish is also a welcome home for hundreds of other microbial agents.

Fortunately, acceptably green substitutions can be found for all these industrial issues, but thinking of organic beer the same way one thinks about an organic carrot can be misleading. The lines between what is by definition organic and what is simply another product on the shelf are blurring. Obviously, a beer certified organic or produced with all organic ingredients will be relatively free of any harmful chemicals, ostensibly making it a healthier choice. But by how much? With many craft brewers already integrating green practices and higher quality ingredients, the health and safety benefits of the “organic” label become marginal.

But does this make the beer taste better?

In Praise of Session Beers

The evolution of the craft beer consumer is fairly predictable. Raised on a steady diet of bland corporate products (or no beer at all), the new beer drinker will discover their first craft beer. It may be brewed by a local craft brewer, or perhaps it is a popular import. From that point forward, eyes are opened, tastes are awakened and what was once good is no longer satisfying enough.

Sooner or later, the craft beer consumer will find a local source for a wide variety of craft beers, and then will read a beer website online, and then all bets are off. The new enthusiast will consume with abandon, drawn to the strong, pungent elements of the high-end IPAs and barleywines, the robustness of the Imperial stouts and the intoxicating (literally) complexity of Belgian beers.

However, on the other side of this heady flavor binge lies another, more subtle arena. This place marks the maturity of the craft beer drinker—not another phase, simply a move from fervent amateur to appreciative yeoman consumer. It is certainly not the endpoint of this journey but instead another beginning. This is the landscape of the session beers.

The origins of session beers can be traced back to Great Britain, probably from one of the world wars. British laborers (or is it labourers?) worked in shifts in the factories, sometimes around the clock. During their off hours, often either before or after work, they would “pop 'round to the local” in true pub culture fashion. These visits became the origin of the drinking session, where a patron would consume four, five, six or more pints at one sitting.

The attributes of session beer arose from these British drinking sessions. The workers required a beer that was alcoholic but not so strong as to leave them impaired or outright inebriated. They required a beer that was flavorful but neither so bitterly hopped nor cloyingly sweet as to grow tiring before the end of the session. Although interesting and mighty delicious, Trappist ales and strong IPAs can quickly lead to palate fatigue, rarely have a neutral finish and the alcohol content can be regrettable in volume. Thus arose the brewing quasi-category of the session beer.

Although traditionally British, session beers can have any origin and are not necessarily limited by defined style. At their core, session beers exemplify the ideal of balance in a beverage. They are bitter yet not too much so, malty but not too much so, lightly alcoholic but with sufficient flavor complexity not only to defer boredom but to keep the drinker genuinely interested.

These session beers are the delicate Goldilocks of the brewing world. They generally have a rich malt base and are mildly hopped, sometimes only barely so. Their alcohol content is generally higher than non-alcoholic beers (which are usually around 0.5% ABV) and almost by definition all are under 5% ABV. Both ale and lager yeast are used for session beers, although distinct and robust strains such as in Belgian ales are usually avoided.

Session beer styles range from English milds, bitters and brown ales to porters and even the milder stouts and Scottish ales. Teutonic varieties include the mild bocks, Vienna lagers, altbiers and dunkels—almost by definition, the Oktoberfest/märzen style is a session beer. Many wheat beers such as hefeweizen and Berliner weisse would also qualify as session beers, as would standard lagers and a few pilsners. Across the pond, American varieties like wheat ale, blonde ale, rye beer and California common also fall into this category.

Do not take the next logical step and believe that anything you can imbibe in quantity will qualify as a session beer. Individual tolerances do not define the session beer category. Instead, it is a world of subtlety and whispers, the enticement of spotting a fawn in the wild as opposed to listening to a lion roar in his cage. Appreciation of session beers marks the successful fulfillment of your craft beer education but still only the start of your craft beer journey.

Can You Take the Heat?

Possibly the most widely circulated and believed myth surrounding beer is with regard to temperature. Most people believe that beer must be kept refrigerated always, and that once allowed to warm to room temperature, it can never be cooled again. Room temperature would essentially spoil the beer, much the same way as any dairy product would spoil.

Except that beer is not a dairy product. Fluctuations in ambient temperature do not adversely affect beer any more than any other foodstuff. Beer is remarkably delicate and yet astonishingly durable at the same time, and the common room temperature is in no way harmful to either its flavors or storage life in the short term. Beer bought from the warm shelves is no different than what is retrieved from the cooler, and may be the exact same beer merely a few hours removed.

So how much heat is too much heat? Is beer something you can leave in the car on a hot summer afternoon? For how long? Can it be stored indefinitely at room temperature? And what is “room temperature,” anyway? What counts as “hot” in Minneapolis is certainly not the same as what is experienced along the Texas/Mexico border.

Beer belongs to a special subset of our food supply that are living things. More precisely, beer is several billion living things—we call them yeast. Like most living things, yeast have a temperature range in which they are happy and comfortable, and a range in which they fuss about, complain and eventually die. We forget that beer is less a beverage and more of a microenvironment, depending entirely on your perspective.

Basically, if you are comfortable, so is your beer. During fermentation, most yeast strains prefer temperatures between 55°F and 75°F (or 45°F and 55°F, if you happen to be lager yeast). These ranges qualify as “room temperature” for most anywhere, and any of us will generally be comfortable in these environments. Over 75°F and yeast begin to produce some quite nasty byproducts, lending off-flavors to the finished product. Much over 100°F and yeast start to die, so their comfort range is pretty close to that of any other organism. But all this is for brewing; what about the packaged beer on the shelf?

For most beers the commercial product is inert, the yeast having died off long ago due to lack of food, filtered out or killed through a variety of pasteurization processes. What is left in the bottle is a mix of sugars, proteins, alcohols, oils and trace other chemicals (plus water, naturally). None of these compounds is active, so the only thing left for them to do is to degrade over time.

This is where the temperature is a factor. Heat accelerates chemical reactions, making the natural breakdown processes of large molecules into small molecules happen more quickly than they would otherwise. What does this mean for beer? Simply this: it ages faster. A general rule of thumb for the brewing industry is that beer stored at 100°F for one week tastes as old as beer stored at 70°F for two months, or as old as beer stored at 40°F for one year.

Time is as much a factor in beer quality as is its ambient temperature. Storing beer in the trunk of your car during summer months is obviously a bad choice—unless it is just for that half-hour transporting it from the store. Fluctuations in temperature are not ideal but are certainly not disastrously harmful to the beer, no more than they are harmful to your own body. A good guideline is to never leave your beer anywhere that you would not leave your dog (and for the same reasons).

Beer stored at room temperature is never bad, merely not chilled... unless it has been at room temperature for many, many months. In this case, the fault is not with the environment but with the retail establishment itself. Do not blame the storage temperature for what is actually a neglectful vendor failing to sell their product in a timely fashion.

The Purpose of Reviewing Beer

Along with the growing popularity of craft beer comes the rising number of fan-based websites and personal blogs. These websites range from online diaries to sophisticated collective ratings systems, from very private first-person accounts to semi-professional and certified beer judges to encyclopedic communities of beer reviewers.

If you have spent any time at all looking up the details of your favorite craft beer, then you are probably familiar if not already a member of many of these websites. Two of the most prominent are Beer Advocate and Rate Beer, both of which have complex scoring scales and product rankings. Others include the Oxford Bottled Beer Database, BeerPal and dozens of other home-spun efforts to emulate the largest of these. With the low threshold of scripting and database tools available on the cheap, new beer-rating websites are developed all the time.

To the interactive websites, we can add the personal beer blogs. These run the full gamut of quality and experience, from the novice just discovering craft beer and stringing together dangling participles with blurry digital photos to the seasoned craft beer consumers, homebrewers and judges to the professional columnists and writers for whom their blog is just another media outlet for their work. But what is the purpose behind all this online beer rating, ranking, wrangling and reviewing?

Some of these websites, especially the larger ones, have developed into both online and actual public communities of like-minded craft beer hobbyists. A few have even gone so far as to develop rivalries and conflicting factions, with their published “best of” lists being picked up by the general media investigating this craft beer phenomenon — which are all topics for another time. However, our focus here is on the purpose of actually writing a personal review of a single craft beer.

First, more writing is always a good thing. In our digital age of e-communication and a thousand channels of pap on the television, it is good to focus on our language skills again. Writing (about any topic, not just beer) is an exercise for the brain. One should work out their mental muscles no less than their physical muscles, and a goal of a sharp mind should be just as important as the definition of your abs.

Along that same argument, writing a review of a craft beer forces you to really think about that beer. Instead of gulping down a beverage, or even slowly sipping one of your faves, you are required to pay close attention to the sensations coming from your palate and translate these signals into understandable prose. You will have to analyze aromas, flavors, textures and even colors that are ordinarily amalgamated parts of the complete craft beer product.

With the analysis, you must also bring your personal beer experience. You attempt to isolate tastes and aromatics and connect each of them with brewing ingredients, other beers, even foods and chemicals. You make links with events, places and memories, both associated with the beer or with unrelated yet similar sensations. Some craft beer reviews can be turn out to be surprisingly personal.

In short, reviewing craft beer makes you think about what you are consuming, which in essence is the entire motivation behind the craft beer movement. Bland products are fit only for a quick, cursory consumption, and are so by willful product design. But if you are spending your money and adding those calories, there should be more to it than just a forgettable experience. Make sure to leave a record of that.