About 10 years ago, organic brewer Ted Vivatson made a beer delivery to a small organic grocery store in Davis. As he says he sometimes does, he took the opportunity to observe customers browsing the beer aisle. He recalls seeing a young woman carrying a basket filled with organic produce and organic packaged foods step up to the wall of craft beer bottles.
“My beer was right in front of her, but she took a six-pack of Sierra Nevada,” says Vivatson, who helped establish Eel River Brewing Co., in Fortuna, in 1994.
He says he asked the woman why, since she clearly preferred organic foods, she had bought a non-organic beer when an organic option was immediately available.
“And what she said has stuck with me ever since — she said, ‘Well, I know that what I’m buying now is bad for me anyway,’” he recalls.
That, in a few words, could be one explanation for the near absence of organic beer from the otherwise thriving craft beer industry. Of the 7,000-plus breweries in the United States, just a handful — a dozen or so, near as I can tell — make only organic beer, and one of the best known examples —Bison Brewing, in Berkeley — folded last year after 29 years in business.
This is a disproportionately low ratio given how much organic food is grown around the country. In 2016, organic crops covered 4.1 million acres of the United States, according to CivilEats. Statista reports that total cropland in the United States amounts to 253 million acres. That gives organic foods a 1.6-percent share of the farmed acreage, and probably of the total market share.
A logical person, applying the same math to the brewing industry, might assume that just over 100 breweries are making all organic beer, which regulations require to be brewed with 95 percent organic ingredients, including only organic hops.
But this isn’t the case. Rather, according to Food Republic, there are “dozens” of breweries in the country that make at least one organic beer. In other words, many, and probably most, of these breweries make mainly beer from conventionally farmed ingredients, since many organic beers are one-off, one-time releases, or seasonal specials. For example, Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. grows organic ingredients on its premises, and the brewery’s Estate Homegrown IPA is certified organic. Deschutes also makes an organic beer — its Green Lakes Organic Ale. But certified organic beers are a small percentage of each brewery’s total production.
The beer industry is so sparsely populated with organic breweries, in fact, that even the Brewers Association, which tracks so many aspects of the industry’s growth and trends, isn’t even counting. Bart Watson, the association’s chief economist, says there never has been enough demand from brewers for organic hops to generate a supply, and without readily available organic hops, brewers who may consider making organic beer simply can’t.
“It’s kind of a chicken and egg process,” he writes in an email exchange.
Thanks to conventional farming and the widespread use certain weed-killing poisons, agricultural carcinogens — namely glyphosate — are lingering in our food, wine and beer, according to a report that came out earlier this year. Even organic products contain this chemical, though at far lower levels, the authors of the report found.
Few people, it seems, are angry enough about this. In fact, even in the wealthy Bay Area, consumers seem more concerned with saving a buck here and a couple of bucks there than with buying healthier, safer beer. Daniel Del Grande, founder of Bison Brewing, learned this the hard way when he closed down Bison Brewing last year. He says consumers weren’t willing to pay the extra cash that it takes to make beer with the esteemed USDA Organic label.
“People just wouldn’t pay an extra 50 cents a six-pack for organic, much less the $1 it cost me,” he writes in an email exchange.
When Whole Foods Markets stopped carrying his beer, “I just gave up,” he says.
Dave McLean, co-owner of Admiral Maltings, a barley malting facility in Alameda that supplies local brewers with malt from grain farmed without tilling, describes wholesale market nuances that reflect the same lack of interest.
“We just don’t see a lot of demand for organic ingredients — just a few enthusiastic and devout customers,” he says, referring in part to ThirstyBear Organic Brewery, in San Francisco.
My take on all this? People who buy organic produce when possible still happily buy beer made from conventionally farmed ingredients because of a mind-trick they are playing on themselves. Specifically, when they buy a relatively pricey craft beer rather than a cheaper mainstream brand, like Budweiser or Coors, they feel they have already made the “right” choice, the “responsible” and “sustainable” and “ethical” choice — the same way they feel they have made the right purchase by buying organic foods instead of conventional.
So, they go happily home with their organic salad makings and their craft beer, thinking that the one is the other’s equal counterpart, even if the beer is not organic.
And as we know, aside from Eel River, ThirstyBear and a few more, virtually no beer is.
Alastair Bland’s Through the Hopvine runs every week in Zest. Contact him at allybland79@gmail.com
