Can beer have terroir? Meaning, can beer have a sense of place to it, just like wine does, where the season and the soil that beer’s ingredients were grown in create unrepeatable characteristics?
This was one of the most interesting questions we debated last Thursday night at Weird Fermentation, the first event in The Stranger’s new Zymurgy Beer Series. Machine House Brewery served as host, and Floodland Brewing and Garden Path Fermentation joined us for the evening. While a packed audience drank beer from each brewery, I moderated a panel discussion where we touched on various aspects of these three idiosyncratic breweries and the beers they make, but this question was one of the most interesting—wine has terroir, does beer?
The question divided the brewers that we had brought together for the event. Garden Path Fermentation’s Ron Extract said he feels terroir in the beer he makes with his brewery’s co-founder, Amber Watts, in the heart of the Skagit Valley. Floodland’s Adam Paysse, who makes beer in Fremont with ingredients he carefully and painstakingly sources from farms around the state, said unequivocally that the idea of agricultural terroir in beer is bullshit.
