No farms No beer Part 2: Bringing it all together

Case study: Dogfish head brewery

This is part 2 of the "No Farms No Beer" post, where I expand on the process of making beer and add a practical case study. Below is the story of the Dogfish Head Craft Brewery.


A true Delaware tradition is Dogfish head brewery. Started in 1995, Dogfish Head has grown to the 11th largest microbrewery in the US, producing nearly 186,000 barrels of beer per year. The brewery is located in the town of Milton, Delaware. The company employs over 100 employees in the brewery alone. While not a farm, they support agriculture by the importation of ag products, such as barley, and other grains, hops, and even some specialty timber for certain brews as we will see.

Dogfish head beer is distributed to 27 states in the US, with over 20 styles to choose from. Their two most popular styles are the 60 minute and the 90 minute India Pale Ale. These two have hops added continuously, versus at the beginning or the end of brewing, which gives both ales a complex aroma and flavor profile. These are the top two beers produced and distributed, and are considered the flagship beers for the company. The amount of time brewed is proportional to the amount of alcohol content, so for the 60 minute, the brew contains about 6% Alcohol by volume (ABV), and the 90 minute, about 9% ABV. Once you get to the 120 minute brew, you're in sipping territory, not one to be chugged at nearly 15 to 20% ABV.


Another style is their seasonal brews including tweason'ale which is created brewing sorghum (another type of small grain) instead of barley, the result: a gluten free beer. Not a bad brew, though it tastes more like a hard cider than an actual traditional lager or ale. The name comes from the time it's available, between the seasons, starting in late January, and being released between each season. This is a great alternative for those with dietary restrictions, or for those that simply want something different.

The one brew that stands out is their "Palo santo marron" which is brewed in a custom made wooden browning vessel, which can hold 10,000 gallons of wort. The wood is from the tiny nation of Paraguay, and the tree's wood is so dense, it's supposedly the densest wood in the world. When the Dogfish Head staff were touring the nation, rumor has it, the Paraguayan guide pulled out a revolver and shot at the palo santo tree, sending the bullet into a ricochet, due to the tree's dense trunk.  The browning cask is expected to last about 25 years, and the color within the wood looks like something that should be on a rich man's floor, rather than holding beer. The brew is a brown ale, though it looks and tastes like a very dark stout, and the flavor is extremely complex, and difficult to describe. It's almost a sensory overload of subtle flavors which wanes after each sip. 

The palo santo browning vessel, capable of holding 10,000 gallons.
The wood is so dense, that workers went through 17 diamond tipped saw blades to cut the wood during construction.
(Courtesy of yourbeernetwork.com)

When asked about their grain, it comes in from many different places, including Wisconsin, Canada and even parts of Europe. From the hops side, this is mainly grown in the Northwestern part of the country. When this is coupled with the fact that the beer is then distributed into 26 other states, it makes for a long journey for one grain of barley or one  from field, to brewery, to pub. 


So, if you'll remember in my last post, the barley is turned into mash, then is separated out to make wort. Well, at 186,000 barrels a year, this barley can be a large volume of waste. The brewers have a few options with the waste. They can pay to have this sent off to the landfill OR they can give it away to area farmers. The managers at Dogfish Head have decided on the latter, offering free waste-barley to any farmer willing and able to pick it up. The spent barley is then used to supplement the feed of area cattle and hogs. So, even if you don't drink beer, the impact of this brewery may still be felt if you consume beef or pork throughout the year.

Dogfish head offers free tours and tastings, so if you're in the area, I would recommend you take advantage of this. I mean, it's free! And when you first sip a sample of Palo Santo Marron, imagine for a minute the travels that every ingredient made. The barley had to potentially travel across the Atlantic (or at least crossed state lines) to reach the brewery, the hops most likely made a cross-country journey to arrive, and the brewing chamber, constructed of wood from another hemisphere, had to be shipped to the US and constructed on site. While this may not be the first thing that comes to mind when the sample hits your lips, it is worth noting the amount of work that went into importing and crafting that bottle of beer. Obviously, this is an extreme case, but there are similar stories with other beers of the world. It's easy to forget where the food that we grow can have so many avenues for how it ends up on our plate and in our refrigerator. 


Interactive Map by iMapBuilder

follow the journey of palo santo marron

No Farms No Beer: Part 1, The Origin

This is me stirring a pot of mash at the Heineken brewery in Amsterdam. 

So, funny story...
As a recent Cornell graduate, I feel it necessary to relive some of my glory days of college. One of the best times of the year was Slope Day. This was the last day of spring semester, and it was typically a very lively day. Fraternities would host parties and barbecues starting at 11am. A large theme of that day was beer, I mean, it's college right? I was never a heavy drinker, but, I enjoy a good beer as much as the next guy. My fraternity, Alpha Zeta, like many other fraternities, had shirts made to celebrate the event. The shirts read: No Farms No Beer, which is a play on the American Farmland Trust's sticker, "No Farms No Food". We were an ag fraternity, and it just made sense to have shirts that reflected the venues, and what the fraternity stood for...agriculture that is.

Well, one large part of Slope Day was a concert on Libe Slope (hence the name, Slope Day), there was a big name band that would headline, I think that year it was Nelly. While waiting in line to enter the concert grounds, I'm next to a brother of another fraternity. For those of you who aren't familiar with the greek system, a brother is simply a member. He was staring at my shirt, and unprovoked proclaimed, "that's so true! without all the wheat fields, we wouldn't have beer!". I had to chuckle, as he wasn't quite correct, but he had the general idea. Below is the story of beer.

The origin: Ingredients in Beer
Beer is traditionally made from barley, though there are some beers that are made from wheat, or even oats In cheaper beers, fillers, such as corn and rice are added to cut costs. For the scope of this post, I will focus on barley. The reasons barley is often used include less processing and a hardier flavor. Barley is believed to be domesticated around 8000 BC. Additionally, there are records in multiple cultures with the production of beer, including the ancient Egyptians, Romans, and Greeks.

More information on barley can be found at the following links: Barley Introduction.

Next, we need a mechanism to change the starches within the barley seed to change into sugars. In this instance, it was discovered that water works well. The process of changing these starches to sugars is called malting. Malting is used in many other applications such as malted milk. In nature, malting is known as seed germination. Malting is a chemical reaction, so once this reaction is complete, we need to stop it. This is done by drying the grain in a kiln. The dried grain, which in now packed with sugar, instead of starches is ground (or milled) and added to hot water. This is known as mash. The mash is then separated from the actual grain, which at that point is considered wort, which tastes almost like sugary water.

Now, we have a vat of wort. From here, we need a mechanism to convert the sugars into alcohol. In ancient times, it was unknown what this mechanism was. Some thought it was a divine act, that this mash (or later on, wort) was magically brewed. It was eventually discovered that the divine organism was actually a yeast. You can thank Louis Pasteur for that discovery. This yeast is extremely common, and natural inoculations were common. I am a big fan of fungi, and found this site very informative on yeast. Yeast transforms this sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, which is why beer is traditionally carbonated. After fermentation is complete, the brew is usually filtered to get rid of impurities, and is bottled accordingly.

Above is a graphic recounting the basic steps to making beer. 

The final major ingredient is added as a preservative. Hops is a vine crop that has antibiotic properties, which was useful in preventing other microbes moving into the young brew. This was before the invention of pasteurization, perhaps Louis was still discovering what made beer instead of how to cleanse it. In fact, 98% of hops produced in the world is consumed in beer production. Nowadays, with pasteurization, adding hops isn't so much a necessity from a preservation standpoint as it is for flavor balance. Non-hopped beers tend to be very sweet.

That's the basic rundown of the ingredients, each brewery adds their own twist on beer. And spices are another post for another day, more like a book.

If you think about it, not only do we cultivate the cereal that goes into the mash, but then we cultivate the yeast to do our bidding and ferment the cereal. This cultivation of yeast is what made it possible to mass-produce beer, and other products, such as leavened bread. The result is a change in taste, a beverage that is resistant to spoilage, and a beverage that is actually more nutritious. Unfiltered beer is very high in B vitamins.

While clean drinking water is something taken for granted, before sound sanitation, and water purification, it was actually safer to drink beer or wine. The alcohol within the brew would kill any microbes. In fact, there are ancient accounts of school-children in Egypt being sent to school with beer to be consumed during the day, in addition to an after-school snack of bread and more beer. Many of the laborers were even paid in beer, a tradition the was carried up until the industrial revolution in the United States. Could you imagine if the most important part of your wages was a safe form of water to drink? It goes to show how far we really have come as a society. In today's day and age, we would never see a union picketing over unfair wages and demanding more beer.