Beer & Chocolate Have an Agriculture Problem

By David Nilsen

This post is part of a series I’m calling Beer & Chocolate Musings for now, in which we discuss similarities between the craft beer and craft chocolate worlds, the people who love both, and the problems both face. These aren’t really finished ideas, just reflections. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Beer and Chocolate Have an Agriculture Problem

The problem, of course, isn’t the agriculture of these products itself—the agricultural traditions and innovations that make beer and chocolate possible are robust and thriving. The problem is the invisibility of that agriculture, and the impact that invisibility has on the public understanding of both products.

While beer fans know their favorite beverage is brewed from (primarily) barley malt and hops, and chocolate fans know all about the cacao tree and its amazing fruit, that knowledge doesn’t generally extend to the broader population. I’m willing to bet if you asked the average person on the street what either product is made from you’d get mostly blank stares, possibly an unsure “hops?” in the case of beer, and a handful of patently wrong answers. Agriculture—farmers, laborers, plants, soil, climate, etc—is critical for both, but if the public isn’t aware of this, they won’t value it and won’t want to pay for it. And that’s a problem.

Barley at growing at Sugar Creek Malt in Indiana. Photo by David Nilsen.

Let’s compare this to wine and coffee for a moment to illustrate the problem. Wine and coffee have both done an excellent job of keeping the agricultural roots of their products front and center. Even if a consumer doesn’t know the steps involved in making each, they know wine comes from grapes and coffee from coffee beans. They’ve eaten grapes on their own, and if they make coffee at home, they’ve handled coffee beans (if not whole, at least ground) directly. If someone has done any kind of wine tourism, they’ve even seen grapes growing, as small-batch wines are usually made right at the vineyards where their grapes are grown.

In the case of beer, the multiple ingredients needed to brew prevent this kind of direct, tangible connection in most cases. Beer requires barley malt or another type of grain as well as hops. Why is it called malt and not just barley? What the hell are hops? Which one are you tasting in a given beer? These aren’t ingredients we handle in our homes (unless we’re homebrewing). There’s an opaque wall between this process and the finished product for much of the public, whereas understanding crushed grapes is very simple.

In the case of chocolate, most people don’t even know the word cacao, let alone understand what it has to do with chocolate. When I explain the extreme basics of chocolate-making at events, attendees are often learning about this ingredient for the very first time. A chocolate bar is just something that shows up on store shelves, fully-formed.

Beer and chocolate are both transformed from their base ingredients far more dramatically than wine and coffee are; their finished forms aren’t really recognizable from their ingredients. Wine, however, still tastes and smells reminiscent of grapes, and coffee tastes and smells like the beans you used to brew it.

Cacao seed and hop flower. Photo by David Nilsen.

None of this ignorance is the fault of the individual, of course. But it does contribute to the difficulty of attaching agrarian romance to beer and chocolate in the way wine and coffee benefit from.

This confusion and removal from an ingredient and process standpoint make it hard to tell the story of either beer or chocolate in the extremely streamlined format the casual consumer needs in order to understand it. Not because that consumer isn’t intelligent enough, but because they’re constantly being barraged with marketing and advertising, and have a limited amount of attention and interest to spend. Wine = crushed grapes + yeast is a pretty easy equation to understand; imagine writing that equation for beer. The multitude of ingredients and steps means there’s no one story or image to leave people with. And as marketing and advertising online get more and more stripped down and bite-sized, it becomes even harder to say anything meaningful to explain any of this.

Does this matter? 

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In the case of chocolate, it matters critically, because the farmers and agricultural workers that make chocolate possible are in a profoundly vulnerable position. Those of us in the craft chocolate scene understand well the exploitation and abuse throughout much of the cacao supply chain. Without an awareness of chocolate as an agricultural product, those human beings remain invisible, and without that awareness and visibility, a $10 chocolate bar is a pretty hard sell. It seems like the height of hedonistic indulgence rather than a necessary correction to an ongoing history of colonial exploitation.

While this exploitation doesn’t exist in the farming of beer ingredients, a smaller-stakes comparison reveals a similar issue on the consumer end. The price of raw materials have gone up for craft brewers in recent years, and they must decide between raising prices on their beer or operating on progressively thinner profit margins. If consumers don’t understand the agricultural supply streams of brewing, why good ingredients matter, and why the prices of those ingredients are going up, they might not be willing to pay a higher price.

I don’t have solutions to any of this beyond having intentional conversations, writing stories that highlight farmers and ingredients, and continuing to plug away. Beer and chocolate are at a disadvantage in this to coffee and wine, but the work still has to be done regardless.