Neuschwanstein Castle sits on a steep, rugged hill just above Hohenschwangau, a tourist-friendly village near the Bavarian-Austrian border in southern Germany. Viewed from a distance, it reveals itself in all its romantic allure. Despite its classical, fairy-tale looks, the castle has a certain sense of melancholy—almost as if the troubled soul of the man who commissioned it, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, were permeating the building’s walls and turrets.
Kössel Braü brewery lies just about 10 miles to the northeast. Its gasthaus is an ideal lunch stop on the way back to Stuttgart, or a welcome discovery for waylaid travelers. During a snowy, winter visit, while resting comfortably at one of its wooden tables, I thought the house Doppelbock—proudly Bavarian, from water to hops—smelled and tasted like it couldn’t belong anywhere else.
Since I had that unforgettable experience back in my university days, I’ve often wondered if I could describe that feeling, that unimpeachable sense of place, as that particular beer’s expression of terroir.
In recent years, this widely used wine term has slowly made its way into the beer world. Although its definition varies, when used in English, terroir is often employed as a simple synonym for the soil in which a wine’s grapes were grown (“[its] terroir is limestone-clay” writes Oz Clarke, while reviewing a wine in his 2008 book on Bordeaux). Sometimes, it is taken as the more holistic expression of the effect of “soil, topography, climate, landscape characteristics, and biodiversity features” on the finished wine, as has been defined by the International Organisation of Vine and Wine. In the 1930s, the concept of terroir was instrumental to the creation of France’s first protected geographical indications (PGI), which are still used today to identify a wine whose quality and reputation are interlinked with its place of origin.
For some, the concept can even be wide enough to encompass human intervention. “Terroir is the totality of what influences the vine as it grows, which very much is a mix of the local conditions and human impact,” says Anne Krebiehl, Master of Wine and editor-in-chief of the international edition of Germany’s leading wine magazine, Falstaff.
But how does that concept map onto beer—made from not one crop, but a mix of grains and hops and water and adjuncts? How can terroir describe a product whose base ingredients might have been processed or shipped in from thousands of miles away? And if terroir doesn’t or can’t apply to beer, how else can we talk about its relationship to locality?
Before terroir was broadened and romanticized into its modern interpretation, the French word had a much more direct and easily translatable meaning. Originating from the Latin word terra, terroir arose as an agricultural term meaning “soil” or “land.” According to Antoine Furetière’s 1690 Dictionnaire Universel, one of the first that was written entirely in French, each crop required a specific terroir in order to thrive: “The plants, the trees, do not grow well unless the terroir is specific to them. Willows, alders, poplars require a humid and marshy terroir; the vine, a dry, stony, and rocky terroir; wheat, a rich and fertile terroir.”
While the term is generally used positively today, that was not always the case in the past. In Furetière’s dictionary, “a taste of terroir” is actually listed as a disagreeable quality: “It is said that the wine has a taste of terroir when it has some unpleasant quality that comes from the nature of the terroir where the vine is planted.” Terroir could imply a rough rusticity, an undesired earthiness—local conditions impinging upon the quality of a wine.
By 1863, when the first known use of terroir was recorded in the English language, the term had assumed a connotation closer to its modern application in wine, as shorthand for the combination of factors that are thought to impart a unique quality to grapes. In ensuing decades, however, it developed a more fanciful interpretation that lent itself to marketing language. As controversial as the term may be in the context of beer, it is still far from universally accepted in the wine world.
“When I first started out writing, I promised myself not to use it ever,” Krebiehl says. “I have used it, rarely, but only when I quote someone who talked about it. Otherwise I steer clear.” The wine world, she says, is “full of hot air,” and it is easy to end up using nebulous and vague language. “The term ‘terroir’ sounds fancy and is supposed to express something authentic, when most of the time it is just laziness. The term ‘terroir’ used by someone sets off all the warning lights.”
Indeed, although academic research—including studies published by Roullier-Gall et al. in 2014, by John Gladstones in 2011, and by Emmanuelle Vaudour and van Leeuwen in 2010—confirms the influence of different environments and growing conditions on wine grapes, to what extent such effects might be perceivable in the finished product remains up for debate.
At Renegade, an urban winery in London, winemaker Warwick Smith sources his grapes from a range of British and European vineyards. While he doesn’t deny the effect of terroir on the fruit, he stresses that this is inevitably masked by the winemaking process—however minimal the oenologist’s approach may be.
“In wine, the skin contact is so important, and also the aging, the fining, the yeast, the micro oxidation,” Smith says. “People talk about terroir as something identifiable in the actual wine, but it only matters at the raw fruit level. If grapes are grown in flinty, calcareous soil, versus clay [soil], then of course that will have an impact on their flavor profile, which is very important when you assess the quality of the fruit, because you can’t make great wine out of shit grapes.” However, Smith highlights that wine is “a made product” that simply wouldn’t exist without human intervention, just like beer, cider, and even Cornish pasties.
“These are all products made by humans by using technology and a range of other elements like yeast, fining, filtration,” Smith says. “The more you are into the making process the more the effect of terroir becomes difficult to identify—unless wine from different terroirs is made in exactly the same way.”
Many in the beer world are also sensitive to the term. Detractors think of terroir as a pretentious incursion, an ill-fitting wine sensibility mapped onto a beverage category where it doesn’t belong. Still, as is true for grapes, the sensory qualities and nutritional values of beer’s base ingredients—hops; grains like barley, oats, and wheat; as well as fruits, herbs, and spices—are influenced by varying climatic conditions and agricultural practices. For some brewers, this is enough to warrant the use of “terroir.”
“I think it’s definitely possible to talk about terroir in beer,” says Garrett Oliver, Brooklyn Brewery’s brewmaster. “We know that modern American hop varieties don’t taste the same when grown in the U.K., and hops like Golding don’t taste even vaguely the same when grown in Idaho instead of East Kent. Your crop is affected by soil type and composition, every element of weather, the angle, intensity, and duration of sunshine, and the altitude.”
If terroir can be used in the context of beer’s base materials, its relevance to the final product is a thornier question. Instead, where terroir might be best employed is in a protectionist sense. When water, barley, hops, yeast, and any adjuncts come from a well-defined geographical area, summoning that origin can protect producers as well as inform consumers.
This is certainly the case for a limited number of historical beer styles that benefit from PGI status, including Lithuania’s Kaimiškas Jovarų Alus, as well as numerous German and Czech styles. As in wine, these PGIs designate products made in a specific geographical location, according to their own traditional methods and showing certain characteristics, and are aimed at safeguarding their reputation against imitations and replicas. (Other historical beer styles—including Belgian Lambic and Finnish Sahti—are protected by TSGs, or Traditional Specialties Guaranteed, which safeguard traditional methods of production.)
The EU specifications for the Kölsch PGI, for example, state that beers that are called Kölsch can only be made in the “city of Cologne and the towns of Bedburg, Bonn, Brühl, Dormagen, Frechen, Leverkusen, Monheim and Wiehl in the surrounding area of Cologne,” and produced in accordance with the Reinheitsgebot (German purity law) with top-fermented “pure culture” yeast. The regulations also specify the required original gravity, residual sugar, and bitterness. Similar criteria are provided for all Bayerisches Bier [Bavarian Beer] PGI’s subcategories, from Schankbier to Eisbier, as well as Bremer Bier PGI, Dortmunder Bier PGI, and so on. Some Bohemian PGIs state further criteria, including pH, clarity, color, water source, and hop variety.
Kentish Ale and Kentish Strong Ale are two of only three U.K. beers that bear a PGI (the third is Rutland Bitter, if you’d like to save that for your next trivia night). Although not as tightly defined as a geographical indication for wine, the specifications for Kentish Ale and Kentish Strong Ale cover much of what’s involved in making the beer.
“The PGI is a mixture of the raw materials, the hops, the water that we draw from the local artesian well, our own yeast strain, as well as the traditional processes that we use to make the beer,” says Mike Unsworth, master brewer at Shepherd Neame in Kent. “We brew in a traditional oak mash tun, which is from the First World War.”
Of course, breweries don’t need to apply for a PGI to brew all-local recipes. Hepworth Sussex is a traditional 3.5% ABV Pale Ale made exclusively with Sussex-grown ingredients. In Texas, Beerburg Brewing makes an innovative beer using mesquite-smoked Texas malt, mesquite leaves for bitterness instead of hops, and “toffee-esque” mesquite beans for added sweetness.
Just as Pinot Noir grapes do in a Grand Cru Burgundy, such regionally specific ingredients are supposed to allow these beers to express their own terroir, perceived by the drinker as a unique sensory experience. Unlike wine, however, a beer’s ingredients are rarely traceable to a single geographical entity. Beerburg’s mesquite-based beer or PGIs such as Kölsch and Kaimiškas Jovarų Alus represent but a fraction of the world’s beer. As such, the interpretation of the term “terroir” as an expression of a unique geographical entity can’t be as representative as it is for wine.
Whether PGI-protected or innovative, no beer style is widely considered to display vintage variation. Vintage variation is thought to be central to the expression of the terroir of a wine, as weather plays a significant role in shaping the fruit’s characteristics from year to year. (Perhaps the closest beer gets is the annual variability in hop harvests, which a growing number of breweries—such as Cloudwater Brew Co. in the U.K.—are now keen to communicate to beer drinkers. Still, that is only one element of the beer in question.)
Recently, Argentina’s Catena Institute of Wine made headlines following the publication of its research on the effect of terroir on Malbec wines. The study involved 23 different parcels distributed across the Mendoza region over three consecutive vintages, whose grapes were vinified individually under standardized winemaking conditions. Its findings? Both parcels of land as well as vintage years can be identified by analyzing the wines’ phenolic profiles.
In a fine wine, mild variation between vintages is an accepted, even welcome and sought-after variable—assuming this does not compromise quality. Surgical consistency is instead associated with lower-grade or soulless wines. In beer, on the other hand, any unexpected but noticeable variation between batches might frustrate the drinker and cost the brewery the loss of hard-earned, loyal customers.
“We have specs that we follow so we use those to achieve consistency,” says Unsworth. “Malts, for example, could vary in a number of parameters. For each batch we look at those parameters and we tweak a few things in the brewery accordingly, making the most of experience and knowledge to achieve consistency. And we do the same thing with the hops every time we receive the new batches. Basically, we can finetune the recipe depending on the ‘vintage’ to match the profile we need to obtain.”
Regardless of the ingredients’ geographical origin, beer is generally brewed according to a recipe, and usually has “a desired and expected outcome,” in the words of Brooklyn Brewery’s Oliver.
“Brewing is more like cooking,” Oliver says. “We may use local lamb and vegetables, but also foreign spices.” With most finished beers lacking any perceivable vintage variation (and given that many are made from far-flung ingredients or lab-sourced yeasts), even those brewed using mainly local ingredients are hard to associate with the term terroir.
If terroir is meant to convey the quality of a defined piece of land in a given year, does the adoption of this term really do justice to beer’s distinct, if intangible, sense of place in all its subtleties—like that Bavarian Doppelbock drunk in the shadow of a castle?
In southeastern England, Emma O’Neill-Parsons believes that there’s more to the uniqueness of a beer than flavors and aromas. She wants Merakai, her recently founded East Sussex brewery, to have a strong sense of community, and for that form of locality to shape its identity.
“I made a conscious decision with the packaging and our website to create a purposeful narrative, challenging perceptions of who a craft beer drinker is,” she says. “We are also working towards forming meaningful partnerships, whether that is our local community, business community, the brewing community, or by identifying charities or groups that reinforce the importance of community and well-being, and that we can support through the brewery.”
Merakai’s beers—a Stout, a double-dry-hopped DIPA, and a double-dry-hopped Pale Ale—aren’t necessarily distinctive in terms of their flavor and aroma, and the sense of place that they convey isn’t necessarily a physical one. To look for terroir expression when defining their personality would mean missing the scope of their message.
“The whole experience of our brewery, the story behind the beer, that sense of belonging to something bigger than yourself, that is what enhances the drinking experience and the taste of our beers,” O’Neill-Parsons says.
For Piers Baker, owner of the Sun Inn and the Church Street Tavern in Essex, malt and hops are also just part of the story. It’s the traditional pub, its rituals and its social environment, that give the beers he pours their own sense of place.
“At home, I often drink a beer called Pintle from Burnt Mill Brewery. I find it refreshing and thirst-quenching, but when we have it on draft at the pub it just tastes different,” he says. “Plus you just can’t replicate cask beer in a bottle or in a can. A lot of our customers, while they’re drinking beer at home, they’re still craving a pint at the pub. It’s a combination of flavor, the environment, and the social interaction.”
In an increasingly globalized and crowded craft beverage market, the magic of the term terroir—and the sense of authenticity, superior virtue, and genuine identity it supposedly conveys—is too juicy an opportunity for brewers, marketers, or communicators to pass up and not retrofit into their own vocabulary. When most beer styles are easily replicable virtually anywhere in the world, heritage and sense of place offer an opportunity to stand apart. As the early 20th-century German philosopher Walter Benjamin—who analyzed how art was affected by “mechanical reproduction”—might argue, terroir is capable of lending each beer its own “aura” of uniqueness.
And yet it’s only by going beyond the mere organoleptic qualities expressed by the term terroir, and by combining ingredients and brewing techniques with the social nature of beer drinking—the key role beer often plays within communities, and the venues destined for its consumption, be they English pubs, American taprooms, Bavarian brauhäuser, or Belgian cafés—that beer’s sense of place acquires a culturally meaningful value, and can be appreciated to its full extent.
Some might claim to perceive terroir as an expression of the geographical uniqueness of a Czech Lager or Belgian Lambic, but it’s better to think in terms of a pint’s holistic sense of place, one which really allows drinkers to appreciate its unmatched, nuanced complexity. The all-Bavarian ingredients of that delicious Kössel Bräu Doppelbock certainly lent the beer its own individual character, yet ignoring Neuschwanstein Castle’s Wagner-inspired Singers’ Hall, getting lost in the Bavarian woodlands, the crunchy snow crackling under my feet, the language barrier with the waiting staff, that gargantuan pork knuckle with the generous amount of dumplings on the side, the brewer—heedless of the crowd—working on the next batch, the inebriating smell of wort, and us speculating on the best way home, would simply mean missing the point.
Maybe the concept is wide enough that we don’t need to try to shrink it into a single word. After all, there’s so much more than just terroir in a beer’s sense of place.
Words by Jacopo MazzeoIllustrations by Colette Holston
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