Pirate's Cove

Thanks. Just because of your selfishness in eating burgers, driving fossil fueled vehicles, and living a modern lifestyle, rather than giving up meat, paying $130K for a Tesla, and paying extra taxes to The Government, beer will taste different

Climate Change Will Make Beer Taste Different (Yes, Really)

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Colleen Doherty, an associate professor of molecular and structural biochemistry at NC State whose work focuses on the connection between time and stress in plants. This post is part of a series highlighting ways that NC State is helping us understand, mitigate and prepare for the impacts of climate change.

Although centuries old, beer is continually changing. New trends in everything from ingredients to brewing styles alter how a beer tastes. But not all changes are under our control. Beer is almost certainly going to taste different in the future, because the ingredients themselves are changing.

Specifically, beer won’t taste the same due to the effects of changing global temperatures on hops and other components of beer.

A 2018 report in Nature pointed out that beer prices may rise due to climate change. Increasing temperatures and more frequent droughts will drive up the costs of beer ingredients such as hops and barley. However, the impacts they identified are just the foam on the surface – the taste of beer will change too. That’s because changes in temperature and rainfall affect the biochemistry of beer ingredients like hops – and that makes them taste different.

But rising temperatures aren’t the only problem. My research focuses on the fact that the timing of our current temperature increase is different than anything we’ve seen since agriculture started thousands of years ago. These changes in daily and seasonal temperature patterns – warmer nights, earlier springs – disrupt how plants function, hurts yields, affects the cost of the ingredients, and affect how beer tastes.

Basically, this is what has always happened. There’s no need to bringing witchcraft, er, anthropogenic causation into the Blamestorm. It was warmer during the Global Climate Optimum and Roman Warm Period. What caused those? As well as the other warm periods during the Holocene? What brought on the Holocene, ending the last glacial age? What caused the cool periods between the warm ones?

…However, one majorly scary aspect of climate change, at least from the beer production perspective, is that nights are warming faster than days. (This is actually scary for lots of crops).

Suffering through a warm summer day in North Carolina, you can predict that the night will be cooler than the day, but not too cold. Likewise, in winter, even though it’s cold outside, there’s a good chance it will be even colder at night. The difference between the day and night temperature difference is relatively consistent all year round here in North Carolina. There’s always a few exceptions where a cold front moves through, and the night will be warmer than the day, but these are rare, happening no more than a few times per year. However, this consistent degree-difference between day and night is shrinking, mostly because nights are getting warmer.

Nights are warming faster than days due to something called the “boundary layer effect,” which basically means that subtle changes in daytime temperature are amplified at night. One effect of this, for example, is that the number of nights where the temperature dips below freezing (32?) has decreased over the last 50 years. And warmer nights also affect the compounds produced by hops.

Now, that is a big concern, but, so far, it cannot be definitively be proven that this is mostly/solely caused by Mankind’s output of greenhouse gases (nor can the whole of a changed climate). Certainly, things like land use, the urban heat island effect, and aerial pollutants have an effect.

None of this matters. It is simply an attempt to scare Other People into joining the Cult of Climastrology.