It may come as a surprise to some, not at all to others, that some of the leading activists in the organic revolution are brewers and breweries. In a profession where all of your raw materials are harvested off a farm, it's not really that surprising at all.
Organic beer is just like every other organic product; it must include only organic materials. In order to be labeled organic, the brewery itself must be certified by the USDA to put the USDA Organic label on their bottles. There are many breweries using organic materials, but not as many are legally certified.
Going organic is a relatively easy step for a brewery to undertake. The main barriers are the price of organic materials and the selection. Right now, organic barley and hops are more expensive, and organic hops have a small fraction of the selection when compared to non-organic. It would be like going into a spice store that only sells salt and pepper; you can still make a good dish out of it, but you're limited.
Beer, in essence and by a funny-sounding German law called the Rheinheitsgebot, is made up of four basic ingredients: water, barley, hops and yeast. This is literally it. No preservatives are even necessary; added chemicals or stabilizers won't really improve on beer's inherent natural preservation. Both the alcohol and the hops in beer naturally preserve it. Many brewers would cringe at the idea of tossing in any sort of chemical additive, organic or not.
This has and will always be the way small breweries and brewpubs make their beer. They care too much about their product and their customers to mess around with something that could affect the flavor of their beers. Big breweries, on the other hand, have taken measures in the past to use chemical additives to ensure the most uniform product across all 50 states and beyond.
When a brewery starts to expand, one of its biggest concerns is making sure that whether you go into a bar in Texas and a package store in Vermont, the beer will taste exactly the same. This isn't necessarily a good thing.
According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, in 1982 Miller Lite contained the following ingredients: propylene glycol alginate, water, barley malt, corn syrup, chemically modified hop extracts, yeast, amyloglucosidase, carbon dioxide, papain, sugar, potassium metabisulfite and Emka malt.
I'm not trying to scare you here; there really isn't anything "dangerous" in the above list. But is it all necessary? Miller products currently use chemically modified hop extracts that will not skunk under light. I'm not exactly sure which part of their "Triple Hops Brewed" campaign this falls under.
Of all the organic beers around, there are two relatively large breweries in New England that are certified USDA organic: Wolaver's from Middlebury, VT and Peak Organic from Portland, ME.
Of the two, Wolaver's offers a more conventional list of beers, including a pale ale, IPA, brown ale, witbier and oatmeal stout. They also do a seasonal Farmer's Series of beers, in which they brew a beer using an organic product from a local farmer and name it after him (or her). The current list includes pumpkin ale, local hops ale and an organic wheat and oats ale. For their tenth anniversary, they brewed a "real" farmhouse ale (a saison) and donated 10% of the sales to the Organic Farming Research Foundation. I would recommend picking up their oatmeal stout if you like dark espresso in your beer. Simply delicious.
Peak Organic likes to stand out a little in their offerings. Their current lineup includes an IPA, pale ale, amber, nut brown ale, pomegranate wheat ale with açai, espresso amber ale and maple oat ale. Peak also likes to brew their beers with lots of locally made organic products, like the maple syrup used in their maple oat. The espresso amber is the first Fair Trade beer made in the United States, meaning the people who grew the coffee are treated fairly throughout the process. It is also the beer I would recommend; it's not typical to find coffee flavors in a not-so-roasty beer, but it works perfectly in this.
Next week I'll be getting into sustainable brewing for the second part of "Eco-Brews" in honor of the upcoming Earth Day (April 22nd). Don't miss it!
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