Many want beer protected against climate change
MOUNT ANGEL, Ore. — On a bright day this fall, tractors crisscrossed Gayle Goschie’s farm about an hour outside Portland, Oregon. Goschie is in the beer business — a fourthgeneration hops farmer. Fall is the off-season, when the trellises are bare, but recently, her farming team has been adding winter barley, a relatively newer crop in the world of beer, to their rotation, preparing barley seeds by the bucketful.
In the face of humancaused climate change impacting water access and weather patterns in the Willamette Valley — a region known for hops growing — Goschie will need all the new strategies the farm can get to sustain what they produce and provide to local and larger breweries alike.
All of a sudden, climate change “was not coming any longer,” Goschie said, “it was here.”
Climate change is anticipated to only further the challenges producers are already seeing in two key beer crops, hops and barley. Some hops and barley growers in the U.S. say they’ve already seen their crops impacted by extreme heat, drought and unpredictable growing seasons. Researchers are working with growers to help counter the effects of more volatile weather systems with improved hop varieties that can withstand drought and by adding winter barley to the mix.
Researchers have known for a while that beer production will be affected by climate change, said Mirek Trnka, a professor at the Global Change Research Institute. He and his team recently authored a study modeling the effect of climate change on hops, out last month in Nature Communications, that projected that yields in Europe will decrease between four to 18% by 2050. His first study on hops 15 years ago issued a similar warning to his latest paper.
“If we don’t act, we’re just going to also lose things that we consider not to be, for example, sensitive or related to climate change. Like beer,” he said.