Brewers will feel squeeze of climate change, says John Grogan

Brewers will feel the squeeze as climate change affects the cost of malting barley, says John Grogan

Last Sunday lunchtime I visited one of my constituency's hidden gems tucked away off a country lane in the heart of Yorkshire - Selby's Brown Cow brewery. Just about to celebrate its 10th anniversary the micro-brewery is one of the many that have prospered in the wake of progressive beer duty. Accompanying me were a local representative of the National Farmers' Union and a BBC North film crew conducting a live interview for the Politics Show.

The subject of our chat was the current increase in price and potential future shortage of good-quality malting barley. Breweries of all sizes are beginning to feel the pinch of a near 50% increase in the cost of this key ingredient of British beer over the last 12 months.

Breweries of all sizes are beginning to feel the pinch of a near 50% increase in the cost of this key ingredient of British beer over the last 12 months.​

In western and central Europe, June and July of 2006 were warm and extremely dry, whereas August was wet and cold. Therefore, the rain fell on grain that was not only ripe, but extremely dry, causing it to germinate prematurely rendering the crop useless as a raw material for beer production. It is too early to say whether the crop failure in 2006 is an isolated incident or whether this is a reflection of longer term climate shift.

At the same time maltsters across the Continent have themselves cut back on capacity, putting further pressure on price. The big fear now for the future is whether the growth in non-food crops for energy use will put further pressure on the acreage devoted to barley. In the United States there has already been a significant shift from barley to maize as a result of these pressures.

At the Brown Cow brewery we were almost in the shadow of Drax, the largest coal-fired power station in Europe. Drax is committed to producing 10% of its electricity using bio-mass, which in itself will require over 200,000 hectares of land.

Certainly, high premiums will need to be paid to encourage farmers to produce malting barley (low nitrogen, low yield) rather than higher-yielding cereal crops for energy.

Of course, it is important to keep this threat to the price of a pint in proportion. Malting barley accounts for less than 10% of the cost of producing beer and it is possible the decline of sugar beet will increase the attraction of growing barley for some farmers. Nevertheless, for the first time since the Second World War, all available agricultural land is very much needed in Britain.

Licensees and their consumers alike have an interest next year - when Europe's ministers review the workings of the Common Agricultural Policy - in seeing the end of set-aside (whereby farmers currently receive payments for leaving 400,000 hectares of land idle).

It is an irony that at the moment farmers get a subsidy to grow energy crops on such land, but cannot grow barley.