The Clean, Green Buzz
Bottoms Up On Organic Beer
by Traci Hukill
There are only two places in the world where you can find Santa Maria Brewing Co.’s Organic Flatbread Red Belgian-style beer: at the Central California brewery where it’s made and at the pizzeria that commissioned it.
Each is unforgettable. “Funky” doesn’t even begin to describe the brewery, a ramshackle locals’ hangout festooned with antique license plates and maybe the biggest moose’s head ever to intimidate a tourist, hanging on a wall across from the door. Out back is a sturdy open-air pavilion strung with white lights and a tiny stage in one corner where bands sometimes come to play. The unwritten rule, according to one regular, is, “Never bring anyone here you wouldn’t invite into your own house.”
Quite another thing is American Flatbread, down the road in Los Alamos, a sleepy hamlet two hours north of Los Angeles. By weekday it’s a factory churning out artisanal pizzas for sale in the freezer section of Whole Foods. But on Friday and Saturday nights the cavernous building opens its doors to a steady stream of locals and savvy out-of-towners who line up for the all-organic, wood-fired pizzas, the whimsical art on the walls, the easygoing staff and, yes, the beer.
Organic Flatbread Red is a clean, pungent brew that slips easily down the hatch. It’s developed a loyal following since last summer when Flatbread owner Clark Staub approached brewer Dan Hilker about making a special beer for his place.
“Seems like we can’t keep enough of it here or there,” says Hilker, an ex-Santa Barbara cop with a bear’s build and a faux-gruff manner. “We brew 217 gallons at a time every three to four weeks. They sell 10 gallons a week at the restaurant and I blow through the rest of it here.”
Hand-crafted and hard to find, Flatbread Red sits at one end of the organic beer experience. Right now the thing sitting at the other end hasn’t actually materialized yet, but the organic brewing community is awash with rumors that it involves a team of Clydesdales.
Representatives from Anheuser-Busch visited the Butte Creek Brewing Co. in Chico a few months ago, reportedly to investigate the possibility of starting a line of organic beers. None of the brewers who now dominate the tiny organic beer market are panicking, but the thought of competition from the King of Beer Marketing is cause for some concern.
“It would be interesting to see,” muses Lyle Morse, president of Olympia, Wash.-based Fish Brewing Co., which produces Wild Salmon Organic Pale Ale and several other organic brews in addition to a non-organic line. “Will they just take your market away or bring a huge market awareness with them?”
“I think it’ll open up the market in a huge way,” says Butte Creek’s General Manager Tom Atmore. “They’re the only ones who could get organic beer in every Safeway, boom, in a week.”
The market is already getting hip to organic beer. The public has steadily warmed to organic goods over the last decade, buying them up at an increase of about 20 percent a year since 1997. If the Organic Trade Association is to be believed, by 2025 the average American household will spend 14 percent of its grocery budget on organic products. Including, of course, beer.
In preparation for that glorious day, the Northwest chapter of the Master Brewers Association of the Americas chose “organic beer” as the focus of its annual meeting last fall, although to hear most organic brewers tell it, they’re late to the party. Apparently Americans have already developed a nigh-unslakable thirst for eco-friendly brews.
“We went from 1,800 barrels in 1998 to 8,000 barrels last year,” says Morgan Wolaver, who started Wolaver’s Certified Organic Ale in Santa Cruz in 1997 before going on to buy Otter Creek Brewing and relocating to Vermont in 2002. The top-selling organic brand, Wolaver’s now sells in the Northeast, the mid-Atlantic and the West Coast. “The demand is definitely there.”
Butte Creek is also growing by leaps and bounds, and is poised to add five states this summer to the 21 in which it already distributes. But the brand with perhaps the farthest geographical reach is Lamar St. Ale. Chicago-based Goose Island brews it for Whole Foods, which carries the beer (named for the Austin boulevard where the chain was born) in its stores in 31 states.
Matt Brynildson was brewmaster at the otherwise conventional Goose Island the first time it brewed organically, which was for Wolaver’s during the latter’s experiment with a regional business model. Brynildson says it was mainly a matter of finding sources of organic malted barley and hops. Otherwise, things stayed pretty much the same. “We already used no preservatives or additives,” he says. “It was mostly just sourcing and keeping the raw materials separate from the non-organic, and validating all that.”
In fact, he thinks beer brewers are naturally inclined toward the values the organic industry represents. For one thing, many brewers abide by the strict German brewing law known as the Reinheitsgebot. That puts them in a traditionalist frame of mind that eschews things like genetically modified grains. “Certainly the craft brewers have stayed a pretty purist group,” says Brynildson, now brewmaster at Firestone Walker in Paso Robles.
But going organic isn’t exactly a cakewalk, especially if a big player like Budweiser joins the game. Wolaver says that could make the supply of organic malting barley (the largest single ingredient in beer) tight for a while, although he adds that in the long run “it should be a good thing from the standpoint that more farmers will convert their conventional crops to organic.”
Without exception the people interviewed for this story said the hardest part about going organic was finding the hops. Turns out it’s notoriously difficult to grow hops in the United States without pesticides because they easily succumb to fungal diseases found here and not elsewhere. Most organic hops are grown in New Zealand, England or Germany and sold at triple the price of conventional hops.
The dried flowers of a vine, hops comprise a tiny fraction by weight of beer’s ingredients, so until now it’s been legal to use conventional hops in organic beer, thanks to some wiggle room in the national organic standard. (Organic brews—unlike their non-organic brethren which can contain a multitude of additives—are also legally allowed to contain certain non-organic processing agents like citric acid, carrageenan, pectin, calcium carbonate, calcium chloride, gypsum and enzymes.)
That hops loophole is set to close next year unless the beer industry moves fast to get hops added to a short list of exceptions to the all-organic rule, says Gwendolyn Wyard of the organic certifying organization Oregon Tilth. “I would be surprised if hops don’t find their way onto that list,” she says.
Emily Thomas, who owns Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing with husband Chad Brill and brother Nick Thomas, can’t imagine using conventional hops in their beer. “We don’t have to use organic hops, but they’re so much more fragrant,” she says.
If there’s such a thing as organic beer-brewing royalty, Emily Thomas might be it. Raised in the redwood-shaded Santa Cruz Mountains by a hippie mom with a catering business, she naturally gravitated toward natural food stores when she moved to San Diego for college and met Brill. Her uncle, Pat Logan, is one of the founders of Seven Bridges Cooperative Micro Brewery in Santa Cruz, a 10-year-old source of organic supplies for homebrewers. Logan taught Thomas how to brew, and she, in turn, showed Brill, who promptly developed an obsession and a talent.
The couple recently confessed that they’re stunned by their success in the scant 10 months since they sold their first beer out of an industrial park on Santa Cruz’s west side. They didn’t even have labels, just letters on the caps in magic marker: A for amber and so on. Now they’re brewing 120 barrels a month and have been picked up by United Natural Food, a distributor that will take their 22-oz beers all over the western US. They’re scrambling to keep up with demand even though they never marketed.
“People came to us,” says Brill.
They laugh when they remember that they weren’t sure they wanted to put the word “organic” on the label. “Chad wanted to just put his beer out there without people judging it, like ‘Eww, organic beer,’” Thomas says. “But that’s what does make it unique.”
They compromised by putting the word in small letters on the label. Next time they make labels, they say, “organic” will be in a bigger font.
Traci Hukill is a freelance writer and pro bono beer taster in Monterey.
