Anyone with an ounce of sense agrees that craft beers are a good thing with few downsides. Quality beer tastes good, it hydrates you and provides nutrition. Most of all it makes us happy. Yet when we think about the environmental impacts of quality beer there are only a few. It turns out that growing hops, a key ingredient in craft beer, requires a great deal of water and with global warming, the main areas in the United States where hops is grown; eastern Oregon, Washington, and Idaho will see declining rainfall and lower river levels over the decades to come.
Research at Washington State University indicates 300 to 450 gallons of water are needed to produce a pound of hops in the Yakima Valley of eastern Washington, one of the main areas for hops growing. That comes out to about 50 pints of water for each pint of beer according to other researchers at US Berkeley. (Lots of researchers focusing on beer…what a surprise.) Some worry that hops crops may not be sustainable in the face of worsening global warming.
In New Mexico and Colorado hops growing is fairly limited. Colorado has a growing hop cultivation community, largely based along the Colorado River in western Colorado in the same areas where peaches are grown. New Mexico has small scale hops farms, most notably the Holy Hops farm at the Christ in the Desert Monastery near Abiquiu and Santa Fe Brewing Company is growing native, wild hops (Neo-mexicanus 1) at a farm in Rinconada along the Rio Grande south of Taos.
Yet both the Rio Grande and the Colorado rivers are carrying less and less water as climate change dries the Southwestern states and winter snows turn into winter rains. Drip irrigation techniques may help. How else can we sustain beer and hops in a drying West?
Researchers Rachel Li and Charles Denby at UC Berkeley have come up with an ingenious solution. The two have used gene editing techniques to insert basil and mint genes into brewers yeast used in beer fermentation. The modified yeast produces linalool and geraniol, two of the compounds that give hops its strong flavor. Outside Magazine reports that brew masters at Lagunitas Brewing Company in Petaluma, California could not tell the difference between and IPA brewed just with the yeast and one brewed with actual hops.
Thus its possible fully flavorful beer could be brewed without any hops at all, thus cutting water consumption for our beer enjoyment drastically.
Hops is in the same botanical family as marijuana.
Researchers Li ad Denby have started a company called Berkeley Brewing Science to sell an increasing number of flavor inducing yeasts to brewers. As Jerry Garcia once said; “things are weirder now than they ever have been.”
