Saving the planet – one beer at a time
By Phil Mellows
It’s Organic September, and as one of the country’s few all-organic breweries, Stroud Brewery in Gloucestershire is dedicating its bar to a rolling selection of 26 beers from five other organic brewers. Until the end of the month, the tap takeover will showcase, as well as its own beers, 15 guests on cask and 11 on keg. It’s unlikely that so many organic beers will have been gathered in one place before.
Eight beers from North Cornwall’s Atlantic Brewery include a mandarina pale, a red Celtic ale, a Cornish porter, a pilsner, an elderflower blond and a green hop ale made with home-grown Fuggles.
All the way from Black Isle Brewery, north of Inverness, there’ll be a gluten-free English pale ale and two iterations of its Rolling Palace IPA, one made with the tropical El Dorado hop, the other with the classic Centennial.
From Devon, Exeter Brewery will have its flagship Avocet pale on cask, along with an IPL on keg – that’s a generously hopped India Pale Lager – and Gilt & Flint will showcase its Helles-style lager and a double dry-hopped New England IPA.
And Little Valley Brewery, based in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, will be bringing six brews including its Cragg Bitter, a Belgian-style wheat beer laced with lemon and coriander and a stout.
So that’s most styles covered, remarkable really when you consider the scarcity of organic ingredients. Stroud estimates that just 12,000 tonnes of organic barley are grown in Britain, compared with 1.8 million tonnes of the regular sort, and that the two commercial organic hop farms cover a mere 11 acres between them.
That makes organic brewing a costly venture. It demands commitment and a resolute ethical stance. Stroud’s founder Greg Pilley, who set up the brewery in 2006, is a tireless advocate for organic beer, arguing that farming without chemical fertilisers and pesticides is the foundation of thriving biodiversity and a sustainable environment.
That’s not to say you should always drink organic. There’s not enough to go around. But when you do choose an organic beer you should expect to pay a little more, and consider it worth it.
Also for Organic September, Black Isle Brewery, mentioned above, has partnered with the not-for-profit, tree-planting search engine Ecosia to launch Silent Spring Organic Pale Ale. The name commemorates the publication, 60 years ago, of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the book that warned of environmental catastrophe and inspired the early ecology movement.
Half the proceeds from sales of bottles of Silent Spring will go to Ecosia’s bio-diversity projects.