Organic expansion: beer is one of the fastest-growing categories of organic beverages, driven by the influx of flavorful brews and a major player's involvement

Cheers, April, 2007 by Stephen Beaumont

If you're an observant sort of beer buyer, you may have noticed recently a rather significant rise in the number of organic ales and lagers on the market. Further, you may have noticed something else that's new: When it comes to beer, "organic" is no longer necessarily synonymous with "bland."

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It was not always thus. Even a scant decade ago, drinking organic almost inevitably meant sacrificing flavor. And in the opinions of most beer industry observers, yours truly included, the trade-off simply wasn't worth it.

Then came the Europeans and their "bio" brews, led by the organic Pinkus-Muller Alt, Pils and Hefe-Weizen from Germany, and suddenly organic seemed much more tolerable, even enjoyable. Others followed including the spicy, quenching Foret, Belgium's first certified organic beer, brewed by Brasserie Dupont. A flavor-rich ale came from a most unexpected place: Jade from France's Brasserie Castelain. It appeared inevitable that America's craft breweries would follow suit.

One of the first successful enterprises to do so was Wolaver's, which started life in 1997 as a contract brewing company, hiring independent breweries to craft their organic ales for them. With organics just beginning to take hold in the public consciousness, growth was slow, but steady, and before long the Wolaver brothers, Morgan and Robert, were looking for a brewery to call their own. That's when Middlebury, Vt.'s Otter Creek Brewing entered the picture.

Already an established craft brewery and one of the contracting breweries Wolaver's was using, Otter Creek came up for sale in 2001. The deal to buy the older company closed in June, 2002, and the brothers Wolaver were finally masters of their own destiny.

In each of the years since the brewery purchase, Wolaver's beers have experienced 18 percent growth, according to Morgan Wolaver, and are now sold in states across the U.S. and even in parts of Japan. And with 11,000 barrels of production in 2006, Wolaver is confident that the best is still to come.

From the looks of the marketplace, he's right. According to the Organic Trade Association (OTA), sales of organic beer in the U.S. reached $19 million in 2005, increasing from less than half that amount in 2003 and tying it with coffee as the fastest growing category of organic beverages.

The past few years have seen dozens of breweries either introduce organic brands--such as Lakefront Brewing of Milwaukee, Wis., with its Organic E.S.B. and the three brand organic line-up of Fish Brewing of Olympia, Wash.--or take their entire line-up organic, as with Pisgah Brewing of Black Mountain, N.C., and the Bison Brewery of Berkeley, Calif. In fact, such has been the category growth that 2006 saw the first ever North American Organic Brewers Festival take place in Portland, Ore.

The surest sign of the coming of age of organic brewing, however, must be the entry of a concern known as the Green Valley Brewing Company of Fairfield, Calif., with its crisp Wild Hop Lager and suitably bitter Stone Mill Pale Ale. What makes Green Valley so special? The answer is found in the small type message lurking in the lower corner of each beer's website, stating that the previously unheard of entity is "the organically certified brewery of Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc."

And when a giant like A-B throws its hat into the ring, particularly when, as one A-B brewer told me, it took three years of organic malt certification and brand development to get them there, then you know the future of organic ale and lager is very bright indeed.

Stephen Beaumont is the author of five books on beer and a leader in beer education for service industry professionals.