BONUS CONTENT: How Climate Change is Reshaping the Beer Industry

The essay was submitted as a draft for my principles if professional writing course, but has been edited to perfection for my subscribers.

How Climate Change is Reshaping the Beer Industry

Imagine if every sip of beer sent stark visions of the blazing wildfires, deadly floods, melting icecaps, and 100-plus-degree heat waves that occur around our world each day — now, more frequently and powerfully than ever before. The Torched Earth Ale beer was created for this purpose.

One of the most hard-hitting, yet lesser-known, consequences of global warming is how it is reshaping the beer industry. New Belgium Brewing Company (n.d.) designed the risky, less-than-desirable ale flavor to bring attention to these negative effects caused by the climate crisis. The brewery replaced fresh hops with hop extracts and dandelions, malt with various malt extracts, and purified water with smoke-tainted water to create its best prediction of beer’s flavor in a “climate-ravaged future,” (Climate: New Belgium Brewing, n.d.).

A change unwelcome by many, researchers predict, in addition to utilizing poorer-quality ingredients for beer production, increased temperatures and devastating droughts will also impact the supply and pricing of beer by the end of the century. And no region in the world will be unaffected by this issue.

Used to celebrate, grieve, destress, communicate — and an unending list of other purposes — beer has been one of the most-consumed alcoholic beverages in the world for several centuries. The scarcity of it could change how humans socialize and may create a hole in the global economy. 

This is just one example of many of the wide-ranging impacts felt by climate change.

Sparse beer supply

Beer is traditionally brewed with a base of yeast, wheat, hops, barley, and sugar before the addition of other flavors and spices. Researchers predict that increased temperatures and mega-droughts will halt production for all of these crops — hitting the barley supply hardest.

In a 2018 study by Nature Plants, researchers analyzed the events of climate change to predict four case scenarios on the beer industry. They forecasted that global warming would yield global losses of barley between the best-case scenario of 3 percent and worst-case scenario of 31 percent. In some places, including China and the United States, researchers expect barley production will rise, but it will likely not be enough to offset the worldwide production decrease (Xie et al., 2018). 

Colleen Doherty (2018), an associate professor of molecular and structural biochemistry at North Carolina State University, has a bigger concern for the supply of malts and hops, stating these ingredients will be impacted because “nights are warming faster than days.” Because the development process for many plants occurs at nighttime to protect them from the heat, the plants will either adapt or develop at a slower pace as temperatures at night become closer to daytime temperatures. Doherty (2018) said this change is “scary for a lot of crops.” The impact to the compounds produced by malts and hops — the drink’s most flavorful ingredients — will slowly alter the taste of beer globally. She said “It isn’t just how much the temperature changes, but when that change happens,” (2018).

The World Wildlife Fund (n.d.) mostly attributes the potential damage to hops, barley and malt production to a limited water supply. The water-intensive industry utilizes an amount equivalent to that of hundreds of thousands of residents each year. According to WWF (n.d.), the average craft brewery uses five to six gallons of water for every one gallon of beer, mostly for farming. Barley can require between 15 to 17 inches of water during a full growth cycle, while hops can require up to 70 inches, (WWF, n.d.).

Despite the United States' rare case of producing more barley amid the climate crisis, WWF (n.d.) estimates the nation’s beer supply will drop by up to 20 percent, because it will export the product substantially more than it has before. The worst-case scenario in the Nature Plants' study (2018) forecasts a 16 percent decrease in global beer consumption. 

Economical impact

In addition to the production shortage, researchers expect global beer prices to double. They predict the highest prices to be seen inCanada, Ireland, Italy and Poland. In Ireland, the price for a standard 16-ounce beer in could triple in cost, increasing by about $5, because of their higher willingness to pay as the world’s largest beer consumer on a per-person basis. The Czech Republic will likely see a decrease in prices before experiencing a rise of about 600%, (Warren, 2018).

The global economy will also have a large gap to fill because of the supply decrease. Currently, the beer industry accounts for 2 million jobs in the U.S., contributing more than $330 billion to the national economy each year (Economic Impact, 2021).

Breweries and companies respond

As the climate crisis becomes more dire, breweries and other beer production companies have responded by increasing their sustainable efforts and bringing attention to the issue.

The Brewer Association (2019) created the sustainability benchmark project, in collaboration with global sustainability consultancy firm Antea Group. The association invited brewers to participate in a study that analyzed data of businesses that practiced sustainability efforts related to their beer production.

The aforementioned New Belgium Brewing Company has refined its sustainability in several ways over the last few years. In addition to its Torched Earth Ale, its Fat Tire family of beers became “America’s first certified carbon neutral beer” last year, (Climate: New Belgium Brewing, n.d.). It has also committed to sustainable packaging, clean energy, and supporting bicycle travel.

Study limitations

Researchers of the Nature Plants' study have recognized that their study has some limitations, including the difficulty to determine if barley-growers' can adapt by sustainable practices, as well as the difficulty to predict the future of beer consumption and changes in taste. 

They clarified that their results “reflect impacts of extreme events as they are happened in the present day.” The global population and socioeconomic conditions are also held constant, (Xie et al, 2018).

As trends quickly change and the economy shifts, it’s impossible to know which of the four case scenarios is most accurate. But with the fast-growing global population and the climate that’s changing even more rapidly, researchers can be absolutely certain that the beer industry will be impacted. And the impact will likely be one of damage.