Terroir: Bollocks for All?

Matt at Pellicle stirred things up a bit yesterday with his post titled "There is No Such Thing as Terroir in Beer". There followed a raft of commentary on Twitter, which I got engaged in as a result of retweeting the article:

Interesting read from @totalcurtis, and I think I get what he means.

Inputs are agricultural, yes, but without human intervention they will not become beer.

However, I do believe a brewer can capture a sense of place in their beer, but that goes beyond mere terroir. https://t.co/jDJUeJI9JQ

— Alistair Reece (@Fuggled) June 12, 2023

This got me thinking more about the concept of terroir in general and so I figured I'd do a little research and put my thoughts down in a blog post.

The first thing I wanted to make sure of was that I had a proper understanding of "terroir", what it is, what it isn't, and for that I turned to the world of wine, in particular this video by Konstantin Baum:

In the video, Konstantin lays out 2 competing visions of "terroir", the "naturalist" approach that focuses purely on the impacts of the soil, geology, and climate on the fruit, and the "culturalist" approach that also includes the impact of human activity on the wine. As Konstantin points out the "naturalistic" approach "is misleading in its mythic simplicity, vineyards are not naturally occurring, they are cultured land, managed by people".

I also discovered that UNESCO actually has a definition of "terroir" as being:

"a living and innovative space, where groups of people draw on their heritage to construct viable and sustainable development."

I think it is clear then that the naturalist approach to terroir is unhelpful as it diminishes the key inputs of humans in the creation of wine. I love the phrase Konstantin uses in his video, that the naturalist approach almost has a vision that "the wine makes itself, or flows out of a crack in the soil like a miracle wine fountain".

It is true that grapes will ferment in nature, as they overripen and the sugars turn to alcohol - ever wondered why wasps are more aggressive in the autumn? It's because they are pissed on fermenting fruit. However, simply fermenting fruit does not make wine, cider, or perry, if that were the case there would be no need for wine makers, cider makers, or perry makers.

So much of what I learnt about the culturalist approach to terroir actually chimes deeply with me with regard to the segment of craft brewing that I find myself drawn to, and it clarifies some of my thoughts around the problem of "local" beer. I have basically got to the point that I can no longer think of a factory that makes beer in a given location, whilst importing grain from Canada, hops from Germany, yeast strains from the UK, and removing all the mineral distinctions from their water as a "local" brewery. This is not to say that I won't drink their beer, or that I don't like them as a brewery, but they are no more special to me than a brewery making similar beers in North Carolina, California, or Germany. Surely there must be more to local than just location?

In this sense, what Matt says in his article is true. Terroir for industrial brewing is bollocks, and when I say industrial I mean it in the sense that the beer is made in a factory with a globalised supply chain that could, if the owners so desired, be picked up and plonked somewhere on the other side of the planet and make the exact same beer.

However, that is not true for all beer. 

Here in Virginia we have a distinction made in the brewing laws for a business that functions as a "farm brewery". A farm brewery is required to grow a minimum portion of their ingredients on their own land. It is a very pre-Industrial Revolution model, and one that I find deeply appealing. Just up the road from me is Lickinghole Creek Brewing, I think they were the first farm brewery in Virginia, and they grow a substantial amount of their ingredients on their 305 acre farm. Given the culturalist approach, I would argue that for Lickinghole Creek, and other farm breweries, and breweries that source the vast majority of their ingredients from their locality, the concept of terroir is most definitely not bollocks.

I think this comes back to the parting of the ways I wrote about a few weeks ago, where you have "craft" brewing as an expression of modernity (or post-modernity if they are self-consciously cool), industrial lite you could say, and then you have "artisanal" brewing which roots itself in a sense of place and tradition, where terroir is very real, and cherished.

Without Farms There is No Booze

First there came the beer, the colours, the aromas, the flavours, the multitude of things you can do with just four inputs, malt, hops, yeast, and water. Think of beers as diametrically opposite as a Czech 10° pale lager and jet black imperial stout, and everything in between, and you have wildly different interpretations and expressions of the same four basic inputs. 

I am deliberately avoiding adjuncts here because the word "adjunct" just means something is non-essential, and rice, corn, marshmallows, breakfast cereal, invert sugar, etc are not really all that essential to make beer, they have their place, but they are not essential to beer per se.

Beer is a product of the genius of humanity, of our innate desire to experiment, our love of getting a buzz on - you folks going on about unsafe water supply, explain why most human settlements are beside rivers or have wells, we know how to find good water sources. Humans like to get tipsy, some humans enjoy getting drunk, they may even be the occasional weirdo who loves a good hangover, and as age creeps up on me, I am not assuredly not one of those.

None of this would be possible without the agricultural revolution that kicked off in the Neolithic period, when human beings started domesticating their meat supply, and their grain supply, by forming communities of farmers. Beer does not exist without agriculture. This simple fact is something I have back to time and again this year in my reading. Whether it is crop reports for barley and hops in various newspapers in the Austrian National Archive, or learning far more about malt than I could squeeze into a single Pellicle article, none of this is possible without farmers.

Of course, it is not just beer that is reliant on agriculture, cider, perry, wine, and basically every spirit known to man would not exist without farmers growing the raw ingredients. It fascinates me that basically every ancient culture created some form of fermented drink to use in rites of passage, celebrations, memorials, or their religious practices. If memory serves, it is in the Epic of Gilgamesh that the definition of being civilised is to eat bread and drink beer.

As I referred to at the top, first came my interest in the beer itself, then came my interest in the ingredients that brewers use to make the stuff, and so I started brewing my own. As a result of my interest in malt in particular, an appreciation of the grains and their producers is becoming an endless source of fascination. The fact, for example, that not all barley strains are created equal, you can't just turn any old barley into malt, and even malting barley needs an expert hand as it grows.

This may be one of the reasons I love the concept of the farm brewery, a distinct form of brewery license here in Virginia. They are perhaps the purest form of "craft" brewing, especially when using malt made from the grain they themselves grew, as is the case with Wheatland Spring, maker of many magnificent lagers, including the pilsner I crowned as number 1 in my recent Top 10 Virginian beer post.

Farmers are very much the unsung heroes of the booze industry, without them, there are no raw ingredients, and without raw ingredients to couple with the genius of humanity for creating buzz inducing products, there would be no booze.

The Session: The Backbone

This month's iteration of The Session is being hosted by Carla, a.k.a. The Beer Babe, who encourages us to:

talk about those businesses in the beer world that aren’t breweries. What are the roles that they can play? What opportunities still exist for new niche roles to be developed? What can local/state/regional governments do to encourage this kind of diversity of businesses around an industry?

Here in Central Virginia he have a plethora of beer allied industries that seem to have popped up from nowhere with the continued increase in brewery numbers (of the 30 odd breweries within 50 miles of my house, only 6 existed when I moved here in 2009), but I want to focus on one in particular, and forgive me if this is an overly obvious allied industies to look at.

Virginia is at heart an agrarian state, once upon a time it was the Kent of the Colonies, a veritable Eden of Humulus Lupulus, but eventually that industry headed out west. Slowly though hop gardens are again becoming a thing in Virginia, with about 25 acres planted in 2014. Much of the renaissance can be put down to small brewpubs planting a half acre or so of hops in the vicinity of their facility - if you have ever been to Blue Mountain Brewery in Afton you'll know exactly what I have in mind.

As I said though, hop growing is, well, um, growing again here in Virginia. The Old Dominion Hops Co-op is a group of 185 farmers in Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland growing varieties like Cascade, Chinook, Brewers Gold, and Goldings for use by small breweries. Some members of the co-op grow on as little of a third of an acre (that's 1375m² for the metric folks) while at the bigger end of things there are those with 2.5 acres and multiple varieties.

As I said, Virginia is an agrarian state, despite the urban sprawl of Northern Virginia, and while we don't have the expanses of the Mid West flowing with waves of grain, barley is an important crop in the Commonwealth. In 2014, about 20000 acres were planted with barley, producing somewhere in the region of 72 million pounds of grain. Admittedly much of this production goes to cattle feed, but with the growth of beer has come a growth in local artisan malting companies, such as Wood's Mill Malt House, Big Trouble, and even Copper Fox Distillery, who malt their own grain for their whiskey and sell small amounts on to brewers.

I am sure there are sexier allied industries, the tour givers, the distributors, the conference organisers, the other assorted hangers on, but it is the farmers and maltsters providing the raw ingredients to the teams doing the work for the rock star brewers, who are the unsung heroes of the brewing world. I for one am glad to see these industries coming back to life in Virginia, so that one day we may actually be able to buy a distinctively Virginian local beer.