World: Global warming is affecting the quality of hops. Beer quality is expected to fluctuate from year to year

Climatologist Martin Mozny of the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute and his team have found that the quality of Saaz hops - the delicate variety used to make pilsner lager - has been decreasing in recent years, New Scientist cited Agricultural and Forest Meteorology on September 13th. They say the culprit is climate change in the form of increased air temperature.

Mozny's team used a high-resolution dataset of weather patterns, crop yield and hop quality to estimate the impact of climate change on Saaz hops in the Czech Republic between 1954 and 2006. Best-quality Saaz hops contain about 5 per cent alpha acid, the compound that produces the delicate, bitter taste of pilsners.

The study found that the concentration of alpha acids in Saaz hops has fallen by 0.06 per cent a year since 1954, and models of hop yields and quality under future global warming scenarios predict bigger decreases.

But this isn't an isolated case, the hop growing regions of eastern Germany and central Slovakia have noticed similar changes in their crops.

It's not just Czech hops that are at stake here, says Francesco Tubiello, a crop specialist at the European Commission and a lead author of the agriculture chapter of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. "The famous hop-growing regions of eastern Germany and central Slovakia are facing the same situation," he says.

This doesn't mean the world is going to run out of beer any time soon does it. But wait, this is just the thin edge of the wedge. Currently we are seeing changes in entire crops that we use to produce consumables. It is naive to think these changes are limited to a small number of beer-making crops. This situation will become more and more common, not just for speciality beers, but for staple foods.

Climate change is creeping into our daily lives, what will it take to make us realize that global warming isn't going away and that we are causing it? This realization may already be too late for us to do much about it. The phrase "act now!" isn't an overused environmentalist slogan, it's a necessity.

16 September, 2009