Like many craft beer aficionados, my love of craft beer is part of a broader attitude toward food. Many of the adjectives I use to describe the creation of beers that I drink- craft, unique, small batch, fresh ingredients, real ingredients, minimal processing- can more broadly be applied to my attitude about eating and cooking. I’m hardly alone: “Foodie” and “Beer Nerd” subcultures have populations that overlap quite a lot.
One feature of my Foodie-ness (and the Foodie-ness of many other Foodies that I know) is a concern with Local-ism (along with hyper-hyphen-ization). Localism (the act of being a localvoire) shows up on my plate in two distinct ways.
First, I prefer, when possible, to eat food that was grown locally, made recently by someone who lives nearby, and sold by a company that is based in my part of the world. Localism Rule #1 is to shop / eat / drink local.
Secondly, many Foodies’ Localism includes an interest in terroir, the idea that products, especially food, are indelibly stamped with the unique imprint of their region of origin. Think Champagne from Champagne, Bordeaux from Bordeaux, Cologne Kolsch beer, Bavarian pretzels, New York pizza…. Respect for (and desire for) terroir is Localism Rule #2.
Craft beer lends itself well to the concept of terroir– e.g. Kolsch, West Coast IPA, pale ales from the mineral waters of Burton, and light lagers from the soft water of Pilsen. These beers are all a natural result of each location’s climate, raw materials, politics, and economy.
Homebrewing follows right along: pick up almost almost any book about creating homebrew recipes and you’ll find advice along the lines of, “use geographically appropriate ingredients.” I think the experience of most homebrewers bears this out: when making a Dunkel, there simply is no substitute for true German Munich malt. Or Hallertauer hops. And so on. And this makes tremendous sense: brewers in Munich spent generations figuring out the best beer to make with the malt and water and hops they had available. So if you want to make an authentic version of a region’s famous style, a really good place to start is with the ingredients that were traditionally used to make that style.
The inherent problem here, though, is that, by insisting on using geographically appropriate ingredients (thereby following the guidelines of terroir, Localism Rule #2), American homebrewers are violating Localism Rule #1. Homebrewers may brew locally, but we source our ingredients globally, in a way that homebrewers could only dream of fifteen or twenty years ago.
All of which makes for an interesting paradox. My last three brewdays have used ingredients from five countries spread across three continents (malt from the U.S., Belgium, and Germany; hops from the western U.S., England, Germany, and New Zealand). The classic Munich brewers designed beers based on ingredients available in Munich. Today’s homebrewers design beers based on any ingredient in the entire world.
But wait. In fact, Full Stop! As a homebrewer, I absolutely love having the freedom to brew using whatever ingredients I can afford. I make a badass porter that owes a good portion of it’s badassedness to the fact that I use English malts- Marris Otter, something simply called “Dark Crystal,” etc. I flatly refuse to swap in the American version of these malts- they make poor substitutes. And ditto the other direction: if I’m making an Imperial American IPA, there’s no way I’m going to use E.K. Goldings or Saaz hops. The ingredients make the beer.
But there’s a part of me – the part that goes to farmer’s markets, buys the fancy honey from the farm in my county, spends money at the local stores even though they’re more expensive, and so on (yeah, I’m that guy)- this part of me looks at all of the hops and malt shipping back and forth across the world on their way to my kettle, looks at the global supply for brewing ingredients and wonders- what does all of this really cost?
First up, malt. I’ll take a look at the international malted barley market in the next post.