Expectations are strong that climate change will affect two crucial ingredients for beer making: Hops and barley. According to some U.S growers, there has been noticeable impact from extreme heat, drought, and unpredictable shifts in growing seasons on these crops.

In a sunny fall day in MOUNT ANGEL, Oregon, a number of tractors navigated across Gayle Goschie’s farm, located roughly an hour from Portland, Oregon. Being in the beer industry, Goschie, a hops farmer of four generations, uses this fall off-season, when the trainings are devoid of any crops, to incorporate winter barley – a relatively novel crop in the beer business – into their crop rotation.

Scott Peterson, a brewer at Von Ebert Brewing, while brewing a German-style Pilsner on October 22, lamented over the negative impact of hot, dry, summer seasons over recent years on the hops they rely on from Europe.

Against a background of anthropogenic climate change affecting water availability and weather patterns in the Willamette Valley, an area notorious for hops production, Goschie is left with no choice but to come up with new farming strategies to maintain their production and meeting the needs of local and large breweries alike.

According to Goschie, the threat of climate change is no longer a distant possibility; it has arrived.

Climate change is expected to exacerbate the existing problems faced by beer producing crops, like hops and barley. Several American hops and barley farmers report their crops being negatively influenced by severe heat, drought and irregular farming seasons. Specialists are assisting farmers to navigate these turbulent weather conditions with drought-resistant hop varieties and the introduction of winter barley.

Jose Vasquez, Gayle Goschie and Eloy Luevanos are busy preparing a harrow on October 31 to be pulled by a grain hopper and tractor for planting winter barley at Goschie Farms situated in Mount Angel, Ore.

Mirek Trnka, a professor at the Global Change Research Institute, affirmed their awareness of the impending impact of climate change on beer production. Together with his team, they released a study recently, published in Nature Communications, predicting a decrease in European yields ranging from 4% to 18% by 2050. Their initial study on hops conducted fifteen years ago expressed a similar sentiment.

“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.

Climate change moves faster than we might realize but still too slowly for many to notice, he said. The fact that researchers started picking up on this means there’s promise for adaptation and solutions in the form of farming changes, but Trnka still has his concerns.

Brewer Scott Peterson measures out a sample of wort  Oct. 22 while brewing a German-style Pilsner at Von Ebert Brewing in Portland, Ore.

Hops declines in Europe mean changes for American producers, too. One craft brewery that gets some of its hops from Goschie said the company is trying to replicate the flavors of German hops using new varieties grown in the U.S. because the ones it depends on from Europe were affected by hot, dry summers over the last couple of years.

Researchers are attempting to develop hop varieties that can better tolerate the effects of climate change, including increased summer heat, milder winters, evolving pests and diseases, and reduced snowfall that might result in lesser irrigation options. Shaun Townsend, an Associate Professor and Senior Researcher at Oregon State University, is spearheading a project where he subjects hops to drought conditions with the aim of developing more drought-resistant variants.

However, achieving this goal is a long-term project, often taking up to ten years to accomplish. Besides, the need to maintain the flavors preferred by brewers and the yield of the hops makes the process even more challenging. Nonetheless, the potential of water scarcity makes these efforts indispensable, Townsend emphasizes.

On October 22, Brewer Scott Peterson engaged with hops pellets from Indie Hops at Von Ebert Brewing located in Portland, Ore.

Concurrently, significant advancements have been made in improving barley crops.

Kevin Smith, a professor specializing in agronomy and plant genetics at the University of Minnesota, conveyed that spring barley is currently the most popular type among the U.S. beer industry. However, the focus could shift to winter barley, which is sown in autumn and remains on fields during the chilliest season. This barley variant can potentially become more functional in the Midwest, where other types of barley have been abandoned due to environmental, disease-related, and economic factors in favor of crops that pose less risk.

Winter barley is also potentially appealing to craft breweries that have started focusing on locally sourced ingredients and prefer produce grown in proximate locales. Besides, farmers can cultivate it as a cover crop during the off-period. This time is generally when fields are empty, and growing crops can contribute to preventing erosion, enhancing soil health, and retaining carbon within the ground.

Though the benefits of winter barley are evident, there has been a lack of complete agreement on its potential. Smith recounted an anecdote about his predecessor, an experienced spring barley breeder, who did not see the same potential in winter barley. When Patrick Hayes, a professor at Oregon State University, shared his optimism for the future of winter barley, Smith’s predecessor dismissed the idea, writing on a business card that it was an unfeasible venture.

Hayes, however, kept this card in his office and made it his lifelong goal to enhance the cultivation of winter barley.

Jose Vasquez and Eloy Luevanos are seen filling up a grain hopper with winter barley seeds on October 31, prior to plantation at Goschie Farms situated in Mount Angel, Oregon.

According to Ashley McFarland, vice president and technical director of the American Malting Barley Association, winter barley programs are now present in almost every state of the country. She believes that while winter barley is unlikely to ever make up the entire crop in the U.S., it is important for producers to diversify and spread their risk to increase their resilience against climate shocks.

Two of the biggest beer companies in the U.S., Molson Coors and Anheuser Busch, publish annual environmental reports affirming commitments to sustainable sourcing of hops and barley, and to the reduction of water usage. However, neither company responded to an Associated Press request for comments regarding these efforts.

Douglass Miller, a senior lecturer at Cornell who also teaches a class on beer, stated that hops can be quite a challenging crop to grow due to their sensitivity to climate changes. He points out that without sufficient water, it would be impossible to brew beer. He warns that the price of beer, as well as everything else on the menu, might see an increase due to the impacts of climate on supply chains.

“All beverage categories are being impacted by this,” he said.

Many studies have demonstrated that global warming poses a serious threat to alcohol production worldwide, from vineyards in France to whiskey distilleries in Scotland. And now there is alarming evidence that climate change also impacts hospitalizations for alcohol consumption.

A study published on September 26 this year in the Nature Communications Medicine journal revealed that a rise in temperature due to climate change has resulted in a significant increase in the number of hospital visits related to alcohol-associated disorders such as alcohol poisoning, alcohol withdrawal, and sleep disorders induced by alcohol in New York state. “We discovered a nearly linear relationship between the increase in temperature and the number of hospital admissions and visits related to alcohol disorders,” stated Robbie Parks, an environmental epidemiologist at Columbia University and the lead author of this study.

The investigators also discovered links between temperature and hospitalizations related to the usage of cannabis, cocaine, opioids, and sedatives— a result most profoundly felt in suburban and rural regions outside New York City. However, amongst these, the link between hospitalizations due to alcohol usage and temperature was the most “robust,” Parks stated.

Grist dives into this new study to understand the complex relationship between heat-related climate change and the rise in alcohol-related hospital admissions.

A growing body of research that shows Americans have become increasingly reliant on drugs, especially opioids, and alcohol over the past few decades. There has been a fivefold increase in overdose deaths in the United States since the turn of the century. This trend could be made even worse “with rising temperatures under climate change,” the study’s authors write.

By looking at hospital admission records and comparing them to weather data over the course of three decades between 1995 and 2014, the researchers figured out how short-term spikes in temperature over the course of a few days affect hospital admission rates related to substance use.

Even a slight increase in temperature, say from 15 degrees Fahrenheit one week to 20 degrees F the next week, or from 60 to 65 degrees F, led to more hospitalizations for substance use. That trend held strong from negative 22 degrees F all the way up to 86 degrees F — the full range of daily average temperatures across New York state between 1995 and 2014.

"It’s not just seasonal," Parks said. "If today was 5 degrees hotter than this time last week or this time next week, we would expect more hospital visits for alcohol and substance disorders."

Daily average temperatures in New York have risen 3 degrees F statewide since 1970 and are expected to rise another 3 degrees F by 2080, due to the warming effects of fossil fuel combustion. This trend has contributed to the short-term temperature fluctuations Parks and his team compared against local hospitalization rates in their study.

Previous research has shown that temperature fluctuations can influence drug use in the United States and overseas, but this study is among the first to look at different types of drugs and find that climate change is linked to spikes in hospital admissions for alcohol-related disorders in the U.S., specifically. Parks and his team found that the pattern was near-universal across the demographic characteristics they looked at, which included age, sex, and social vulnerability (an umbrella term for socioeconomic and minority status). The study controlled for seasonal variations in alcohol use, such as people’s tendency to drink more during the winter holidays and summer months.

"This is obviously relevant in the context of climate change, where we’re anticipating hotter average temperatures, including more frequent and severe heat waves," said Francis Vergunst, an associate professor at the University of Oslo who has researched the effects of climate change on behavioral disorders and was not involved in the Columbia study. "That means there will be more days in which people potentially could be using substances at harmful levels that could require hospital admission."

Though it’s not entirely clear why rising temperatures lead to more hospitalizations for substance use, Vergunst said researchers have some ideas about what may be behind the trend. One possible explanation is that people are more impulsive and uninhibited during periods of elevated heat, which leads them to drink more and consume more drugs. For some types of drugs, such as opioids, warm weather can diminish the perceived effects of the drug and lead people to take higher doses to get to their desired level of inebriation, which in turn could contribute to more hospital admissions for overdoses. Drinking alcohol, popularly thought to raise the body’s internal temperature, actually destabilizes the body’s ability to regulate its core temperature, which could also contribute to hospitalizations during periods of elevated heat.

“I think it’s really important to start understanding what those underlying factors are,” Vergunst said, “because that could be the primary potential intervention point.” In other words, understanding what causes people to consume more drugs as temperatures warm will be crucial to preventing them from ending up in the hospital because of an overdose or some other substance-related condition.

The study doesn’t make projections about how future warming due to climate change may influence the prevalence of hospital admissions for substance use, and Parks warned against extrapolating New York’s data to the rest of the country. More research needs to be done to figure out how people living in the nation’s varied and distinct climates respond to rising temperatures. But Parks said that the study hints at the possibility of a larger trend that needs to be investigated. It’s a starting point for beginning to understand how climate change may influence substance use across the nation and elsewhere.

“New York is the fourth-largest state in the country, one of the most diverse, one of the most extreme in terms of socio-demographic profile,” Parks said. “You might surmise, though cautiously, that this would be an issue across the U.S. and worldwide.”

This story was produced by Grist and reviewed and distributed by Stacker Media.

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Climate change is anticipated to impact two key beer crops: Hops and barley. Some growers in the U.S. say they’ve already seen these crops imp…