Is "Slow Beer" a thing?

It’s not as much of a selling point because the demographic that drinks beer doesn’t care about it as much as the demographic that drinks wine does.

 

I've never seen any kind of organized movement. Like you said, there are individual breweries that fit that criteria.

The biggest issue that I've heard from brewers is that lots of common ingredients (especially modern hop varieties) aren't even available organically grown. In addition, I've been told by multiple industry people that the more natural/regenerative cultivation of grains produces a lot more variability in the finished grain between farms.

Wine involves a single agricultural input and has a prominent culture of embracing the variability vintage to vintage. The culture around beer is generally the opposite, centering consistency.

You see more of this culture around farmhouse styles and lambic and I think that's where you will find the closest thing to a "slow beer" culture.

 

Fonta Flora Brewery comes to mind.

 

"Slow beer" would be a very bad term, IMHO, since there is already a "slow pour" term in US craft beer culture.

I have never heard of "slow beer" though.

 

Never heard the term, though I have seen breweries tout their green/sustainable creds as a selling point.

Beer is also more sensitive to price fluctuations (especially if they fluctuate upwards). Good wine is already a lot more expensive than cheap wine, so if sustainable farming practices add a couple of bucks to a bottle it's not that big a deal. Adding a couple of bucks to a six pack of beer is a substantial price increase.

 

Brewery Vivant fits the bill as well.

https://breweryvivant.com/sustainability/

As has been stated, I’m not aware of that term verbatim but I have seen quite a show of breweries and consumers that have brought these ideas to the forefront.

Cheers.

 

My understanding is that it comes down to what inputs are available organically grown, the scale they're available at, and the variability of those inputs.

We have a local nano brewery that is super focused on this sort of slow beer, hyper local, organic, etc issues. His beer was very very variable batch to batch for the first couple years. He was upfront about expecting that and stated that there were very few inputs that were consistently available and that the things that were available intermittently were not consistent so in order to make a variety of styles he was having to sample raw inputs and do his best to adjust his recipe and process to account for those changes.

We have another local brewery that has an organic core lineup of a blonde, amber, ipa, and porter. They make lots of other beers but most are not fully organic due to limitations on ingredient availability.

So my impression is that a brewery that wants to make great beer that is organic needs to be taking an active role in the supply chain (i.e. let the malters and hop brokers know you want organic and probably make some commitments to purchase volume), you need to spend time dialing in your recipes to account for the ingredient variability, and you need a brewing team that has the skill and experience to adjust to the variations.

If you're a brewery who just wants to include an organic beer in your lineup fur marketing/ business reasons, well you might just slap a beer together from a stock recipe and figure the label will sell the beer

 

Aren't lagers slow beers?

 

She's referring to the "slow food" movement that started in Italy. Emphasizes local, seasonal food, grown without inputs that are poisonous to the environment, and produced in a way that avoids exploiting the laborers involved.

Slowfood.com

 

There is so much deception and mislabeling (as well as confusion and misunderstanding) in "organic" and "sustainable" industry claims I wouldn't put much stock in any beer that purports to being more nor less than what beer making traditionally requires the environment to endure.

As an example there is an orchard near to here that used chemicals for over a hundred years to grow their trees, and now the land is used to grow "organic" tomatoes. I know for a fact not one inch of soil was removed after the trees were taken down, let alone the feet of soil necessary to remediate, before (name of large company not used here) moved in to grow their "organic" tomatoes.

As for slow beer, never heard the term, so not sure if my comment is tangential or on point.

 

There are some "Slow Brewing" breweries with a similar goal.

My local brewery Fiege is one of those

https://slow-brewing.com/en/
https://slow-brewing.com/en/quality-seal/


Prost!

 

I wouldn’t be so quick to assume this.

 

Very interesting idea/concept.
However, as has been stated a few times now, consistency is what many of us are looking for in the BA community. The beer you like to go back to time and time again; you're going to want to be the same. Any fluctuation, for the most part, is off putting and unwanted, imo.

 

Yep. If there was a bigger market for funky/wild/sour/foraged flavoring beer, you'd probably see more of "The 2023 vintage of Weirdo Beardo mushroom ale is more earthy and sweet than the 2022" type thing that is appreciated in wine circles. However, even when there it looked like that was something that would happen a few years ago, the beers were expensive and very small production (and not necessarily great).

I blame the rise in kettle-soured beer. Once breweries figured out how to make cheap, quick, consistent sours that didn't really evolve in the bottle/can and had wide appeal with simple, straightforward flavors, you stopped seeing as many mixed fermentation beers.

 

Bissell Brothers Brewing in Portland, ME comes to mind for local sourcing, when I visited a few weeks back they had a lot of signage regarding beers using all Maine-grown grains and so forth.

Two NE brewers that do a lot of greening of their operations are Allagash also in Portland, along with Tree House.

 

I've never heard the term slow beer but there are a few South Jersey breweries that work with a local malt farm. They don’t use their malt for all the beers but brew several all NJ malt lagers from time to time.

 

The local farms will grow barley but the malt needs to be produced by a Malthouse. Would you know which Malting Company is producing the product?

Cheers!

 

Yes you are correct…

They are a malthouse as well…rabbit hill malthouse..

Here is an old article from 2019 but with neat pictures:

https://www.thedailyjournal.com/pic...t-house-grows-ingredient-nj-beers/1374170002/

I’m sure they grow a lot more by now since I see their malt show up in several breweries beers.