How Climate Change Is Changing the Taste of Beer
- Minhoo Jeong
- Apr 3
- 2 min read
April 3, 2025
Minhoo Jeong
With its refreshing carbonation and hoppy flavor, a cold beer stimulates all of our senses. But one of the world's most popular beverages is also changing due to climate change.
Few drinks are as familiar as a freshly poured beer, with its thirst-quenching, full-bodied flavor. "Beer is a very difficult flavor to describe in words because it's both bitter and sweet, making you want to take another sip," says Mirek Tranka, a researcher at the Institute for Global Change at the Czech Academy of Sciences.
The flavor of beer is a complex symphony of three ingredients: hops, yeast, and malted barley. But climate change is threatening the production of both barley and hops. The so-called "noble hops" that brewers use to make their drinks "will become increasingly difficult to grow," Tranca and colleagues predict.
Since the 1970s, noble hop production has declined by 20% in Europe's largest hop-growing regions, according to Tranca's team's research. The main compound in Noble hops is alpha acids, which give beer its characteristic bitter flavor. However, the team's research predicts that by 2050, the level of alpha acids in hops will decrease by 31%.
So, could beer be on its way out? Is there anything we can do to preserve its flavor?
Beer is a beloved beverage around the world and the most popular alcoholic beverage by volume. Ever since humans discovered agriculture, beer has been a part of society.
Historical evidence of alcoholic beverages made from fermented grains is widespread, including pre-Hispanic Andean societies such as the Chinese Neolithic site of Jiahu (5700 BC) and the Moche culture from the 2nd-8th centuries AD.
In the Near East (Turkey, Iran), Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets and seals depict beer drinking, meaning there is historical evidence that beer was brewed on nearly every continent in the ancient world.
In the distant past, farmers learned that fermenting grains like corn, rice, and cereals could produce a drink that had the effect of intoxicating people. Alcohol seems to have been a social lubricant in the ancient world, just as it is today in bars around the world.
