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.

Child labor on the farm, immoral or essential?

Life on the small farm, my sister and I weeding the garden.
 ( See mom, I told you I weeded that garden!)

My first "official" job was when I was 12 years old. I called it "official" because it wasn't just a weekend gig, I was home-schooled at the time, and I worked from 9:30 until about 2 (my schooling was from 8am until about 9:15am, it's amazing what you can get done when you don't have to wait for others to catch up). I worked at a game preserve/farm and sporting clays range about 10 minutes from my house. When I first started out, I was bundling this coastal grass the owner had grown for duck hunters. He would sell the bundles for duck blinds, which were pretty popular for the region. When I first started out, I worked with this guy named Ryan, who was 27 at the time. And like any new guy on the job, I did my best to follow Ryan's lead, and listen to everything he told me. Now, bundling Atlantic coastal panic grass is not a strenuous task, but about 15 minutes after work, Ryan says, "let's take a break". At the time, I was a bit surprised, I mean, we just got started. I grabbed my water bottle, took a big gulp and got back to work. Well, after another 15 minutes, Ryan got up from his golf cart, and walked over to give me a hand for another 10 or 15 minutes before taking another break. This went on and on for about 2 weeks, until the one day I came in, and my boss started off with, "are you ok with working by yourself today? Ryan is no longer with us". I found out later that Ryan had been fired, as he was lazy, but up until I came on board, he was my boss' only option. I had replaced an employee who was more than twice my age. 


This was a nice job for a youth my age, after bundling the grasses, I helped out with other things, cleaning up the range, mowing the grass, and doing small tasks. These were appropriate for someone my age, and any kind of inherent danger was minimized. There's no denying that there's an inherent risk in working in the fields, but the chances of this is relatively slim when managed properly. It was a good experience, and it gave me a different perspective on agriculture beyond the small farm I grew up. 


Growing up on a small farm, I was nowhere near as exposed to the rigors of living off the land, but nonetheless, I was able to take away some valuable lessons from this experience. For a practical matter, I learned to drive stick-shift, first on a tractor, and later on a truck. It served me well on multiple occasions, including in Europe, where nearly everything is manual transmission. But more importantly than learning how to drive a manual transmission, or how to drive a tractor, I learned something that is much more important. I learned what it means to have a solid work ethic. I learned what it means to give a man a good day's work, and the true value of a dollar. This is something I feel that people simply have lost through our disconnection to the agriculture system. In a globalized economy, it feels good to work a full day and earn an honest living.

I understand, it's not glamorous work, you probably won't get rich picking watermelons, but there's more to life than riches at that young an age. I feel that if more children had the opportunity to work on a farm early in their life, that they would not only improve their behavior, but would also take more pride in their work. I am a firm believer that hard work builds character, and some of the best characters I have met have come from an ag background. And who knows what you can achieve when a sound work ethic is instilled at a young age?

Why I write, an author's perspective

My father in front of his restored Farmall Super M

Growing up, I was not a fan of living on a small farm. When I was 10 years old, I wanted nothing more than to live in a place with sidewalks. I was defiant in living in the sticks. I was pretty ungrateful of this gift. But looking back, living on a small farm had a big impact in my life. This is a recap of growing up on a small farm. The farm is named Triple-M-Farms, and our website can be found here.

Let me back up, starting with my parents. My parents, by and large, aren't from a grower's background. My mother grew up in Detroit, and her only connection to agriculture was her grandfather's garden. From what I've heard, he had quite the green thumb, perhaps that's where my mother gets it from. My father, grew up in the small town of Warren, PA, which is near Erie. Both my parents met while working at a summer stock theater in Indiana, my dad was doing set design and construction, my mother is a "not-so-amateur" actress. They even were married in a theater. 

After their marriage, they found work in Delaware, yes, the state. My father is a teacher by trade. My mother is a registered nurse (RN) at the local hospital here. Again, there's not much of a connection here to agriculture. However, my parents are very insightful. In 1985, they moved to an old farmhouse about 5 miles from the nearest town. The farm is pretty small, it's 12 acres of arable land. Arable comes from the latin word arare, which means "to plough". In addition to the 12 acres of arable land, we also have a large (what I call large, mainly because it took forever to weed) garden. When I mapped it out, it's only about a tenth of an acre, but it feels much larger when you have to hand weed everything. Early on, we grew alfalfa, and sold the hay to horse owners. It was a nice little way to supplement our income. 

Since I was born, we have expanded. In the course of 22 years, we have tried our hand at various crops, whether it's vegetables, herbs, chickens, beef cattle, pigs, and even honeybees. I always took this experience for granted, but looking back, this was something that my parents did, not just for themselves, but also for my sister and me. I remember one night at dinner, I must have been 5 or 6 years old, we were talking about why we grew some of our own food. We still went to the grocery store every other week, but my parents informed me that growing your own food is an important skill. I vividly remember my mother asking me, "what would happen if there was a disaster, and there was no way to get food?" Right there, I realized how important it is to have that skill. Knowing how to grow your own food is a valuable insurance policy in the event of disaster. 

I often wonder where I would be without this experience during my childhood. I can recall some of my fondest memories were on the farm. There's something to be said about spending an afternoon baling hay with friends or family. My mother can attest that my favorite activity in the garden was digging for potatoes. It's a satisfying feeling to plunge your hands into the soil and come up with a good sized spud. I always equated it to a treasure hunt, but instead of finding wealth in the form of gold coins, wealth was in the form of a Yukon gold potato, a symbol of grower independence. My first job was actually working at the local farmer's market, which I also remember fondly.

One of the big jokes in our state is when winter weather hits. The first thing that happens when the meteorologist predicts a snowstorm is people stock up on milk and bread, and it's more true than we would like to admit. When I was a child, I was always amused by this, because I never quite understood why people rushed to the grocery store when snow is coming. As I've grown older, I realize now that people are stockpiling, in the event of a blizzard. This is something that we did throughout the summer and fall. I can distinctly remember my mother in the kitchen preparing excess vegetables for freezing or canning. Growing up, we never really bought vegetables, or steak for that matter. We grew it here on the farm.

So, my question to you, the readers: how often do you visit a grocery store? How long do you think you could go without going to the grocery store if you needed to? say, if you were snowed in.

What is Agriculture? The Beginning

When you hear the word "agriculture", what comes to mind? Most people think, farming. However, this is only part-true. First, let's look at the word itself. The word agriculture, as with most words comes from a Latin word, agricultura. If we split the word down into agri, which means field, and cultura which translates into cultivation, we find that agriculture's literal translation from Latin is cultivation of the fields. This is a series of  the history of the "cultivation of the fields".

Imagine a world where your entire livelihood was searching and gathering food. From sunrise to sunset, all you and your family does is hunt and gather. The nomadic nature of your family means that you move with the food, and instead of a nice 3 bedroom 2 bath ranch house, it's a tent. I mean, why build a house when you need to follow migration patterns of the animals. This is a rough way of living, and because you spend all day looking for food, there isn't enough time to really do anything else, all you do is eat, sleep, and search for food. This is what life was like in 11,000BC.

Fast forward to 8,000BC, the fertile crescent in a region of Mesoptamia, a Hebrew word which translates to "land between 2 rivers". This region is in what is now modern-day Iraq (the two rivers being the Tigris and Euphrates). People got smart about their food supply. I couldn't imagine how revolutionary it was to think, "I'm going to GROW my own food". Now, this wasn't something that happened overnight, and this revolution didn't discontinue the hunter-gatherer way of life. It did, however, allow a shift. Now, instead of hunting and gathering all day, you're able to grow food, either on the side, or in its entirety. For the time, this was a totally new idea.

Fast forward again about 2,000 years, it's 6000BC, in the Nile River Valley, what is now modern day Egypt. The area was very fertile, and was flooded annually, which deposited all sorts of debris onto the fields, but most importantly, it provided nutrition to plants. Could you imagine if your livelihood was all dependent on what we consider today to be a natural disaster? There is a reason that the Egyptians were so advanced, and that is agriculture. Think for a minute, if you are able to grow enough of your own food, and enough to feed your neighbor, then your neighbor is now free to do something else. This was another revolution. This was a shift from subsistence agriculture, a system where you grow just for yourself or your family, to supporting more and more people. Some of the people are now free to specialize. The crazy part of this story is it's repeated again and again throughout history, in Asia, Europe, even in the United States. This is the natural progression of civilization.

Agriculture is responsible for civilization itself. If that nomad didn't think to grow his own food, where would we be today? We wouldn't be able to enjoy our free time, because we wouldn't have any free time. While many of my friends hunt seasonally, it's a totally different story when you come home empty-handed and go to bed hungry.

This is the beginning of the story, I will continue going through the history of agriculture and note major events throughout the journey of people as we became more and more advanced. And it all started with a nomad that had a new idea on how to feed his family.

Introduction:

A few days ago, I read an article that bothered me. I wasn't bothered so much by the content, as I was from the attitude. The article was College Majors That are Useless, and I was expecting to find a bunch of obscure majors, and to my surprise, the author noted Agriculture as #1 most useless major, Animal Science as #4, and Horticulture as #5. Now, the information used to justify the author's views may lead you to think he is right. And while I could sit here and rant about how important agriculture is, and how my plant science knowledge is by no means useless, I would like to, instead, address a much grander problem facing this nation.

The author, along with countless other Americans have lost their roots to agriculture. This is much more of a heartbreak to me than anyone calling my major/career useless. I honestly don't know whether to be angry at people like this, or feel sorry for them. There seems to be a growing disconnect between growers, who produce the food, and the consumers who buy the food. And while this may not seem like a problem, it is.

My goal with this blog is to educate everyone on where the ag products you use every day, got their start, and how they ended up on your kitchen table, in your pantry, in your cupholder. I intend to learn just as much during this project as you, the readers will. I am interested in ALL forms of agriculture, and will try to spread out the topics to capture a broad spectrum of readers.

I am hoping to take you along the path of ag production from the field, to processing, to the household. I am not interested in chastising anyone on their carbon footprint, or not eating organically. That's a life choice that is none of my business. I would also like to plot out the path on a map to thoroughly illustrate the various steps within the ag system. If there is a topic you would like me to report, feel free to email me or leave a comment. I am just as interested in learning where my food, drink, clothing, and other household products come from.

Stay tuned for updates weekly (that's the plan at least). I'll try to cover an aspect of agriculture weekly, whether it's a specific crop or a specific product in the household. I am very open to suggestions on topics to cover.