2023-10-13 15:56:21
Climate
Warming affects the taste of beer and will make it more expensive
Hop yields are decreasing in Europe due to temperatures and their alpha acid content, which gives the beverage its taste, is decreasing.
PublishedOctober 13, 2023, 5:56 p.m.
The hotter and drier it is, the fewer hops there are and its quality drops.
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We already know that global warming has an impact on vineyards, with certain grape varieties reserved for the south becoming a product of the future further north. Well it seems to be the same with beer, according to a study.
The third most consumed beverage in the world behind water and tea, beer requires water, barley and yeast to make it. But also hops. It is the alpha acid content of the latter which partly gives its flavor to the beer. And the trend toward craft beers is pushing consumers to increasingly love hops with a high content of these acids.
Czech researchers therefore looked into hop cultivation to see how it has evolved since 1970 and how it risks doing so by 2050 with global warming. They focused on Germany, the Czech Republic and Slovenia which represent almost 90% of hop production in Europe.
Ripening 20 days earlier
Comparing the periods 1970-1994 and 1995 to 2018, they found that hops matured regarding 20 days earlier during the second period, that yields fell by 200 kilos per hectare and that the alpha acid content had decreased by 0.6%.
Projecting into the future, assuming a rise in temperatures of 1.4°C and a drop in precipitation of 24 mm, scientists estimate that hop yield will experience a drop between 4 and 18% and the alpha content will be between 20 and 31% lower by 2050. Fewer hops would result in a more expensive beer, less alpha a less flavorful beer.
Obviously, the further north you are, the less affected you are. This is how the researchers estimated that the biggest drops in productivity among large hop growers would take place in Portugal, Slovenia and Croatia.
Adapt urgently
In conclusion, the researchers call for “urgent adaptation measures to stabilize international market chains.” Some hop growers moved their crops higher, planted them in valleys with more water and changed the spacing of crop rows, as recalled by «Guardian».
“Hop producers will have to go the extra mile to ensure they get the same quality as today, which will likely mean a need for greater investments simply to maintain the current level of the product,” according to Miroslav Trnka, a scientist at the Institute for Global Change Research of the Czech Academy of Sciences and co-author of the study published in the revue «Nature Communication» .
But for now, high energy costs since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have played a bigger role than the price of hops for brewers. “The hops in a beer don’t cost as much as the cork at the top of the bottle,” says one.
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