Hops, Cacao, & Terroir

By David Nilsen

A month or two back a fellow beer writer wrote an article taking down the concept of terroir in beer. It had Beer Twitter in a tizzy for a couple days, arguing for and against the idea that beer can possess a sense of terroir in the way wine can. Ultimately, where you fell on this debate likely came down to how you defined terroir.

While the writer (Matthew Curtis, the founder/editor at Pellicle, for whom I often write) consciously made the headline for the article a bit sensational (and was aware it was A Take), his rationale made sense—yes, beer can have a sense of place, but terroir in the classic sense of soil and microclimate directly impacting finished flavor is obscured in beer by two main factors: 1) beer is brewed from many different ingredients, so the growing details of one will likely be covered up by others, and 2) so much of the flavor of beer is left up to the choices and processes of the brewer, reducing the direct impact of the ingredients individually.

While I think this argument is mostly correct (though I disagree with some specific points), I’m not here to relitigate a topic Beer Twitter has already hashed out. Instead, I want to briefly look at the similarity in discussing terroir between hops in beer (just one beer ingredient among others) and cacao in chocolate.

Both ingredients are sensitive to their growing conditions and can absolutely reflect those sensitivities in flavor and aroma. However, we don’t eat hops in their natural state, and we don’t eat cacao in its natural state (yes, I know, both are edible and can be eaten on their own, but this isn’t their primary use). Both get processed and used to make something new. And how they get processed and used is super important to their ultimate expression.

In brewing, how, when, and in what combination a brewer uses hops will have a significant impact on how flavors and aromas are perceived in the finished beer. Is the beer single hop, or does it use different varieties together? Are hops added early in the boil, later in the boil, in the whirlpool, and/or during primary or secondary fermentation, and in what ratios? What other ingredients are being used in conjunction with the hops that can directly alter their aroma properties, such as Phantasm powder or a bio-transformative yeast strain?

Two brewers could work with the same hops from the same harvest at the same farm and the resulting beers could be profoundly different in their hop expression. So while hops will show different characteristics based on where they’re grown (I’ve noticed Cascade hops—a variety known for its grapefruit, pine, and subtle floral notes when grow in the Pacific Northwest—take on a more melon-like quality when grown here in Ohio), these differences are far outweighed by choices made during the brewing process.

Similarly, while cacao unquestionably takes on unique sensory characteristics when grown in different places, those differences are somewhat obscured by how the beans are handled post-harvest and during the chocolate-making process. Details of fermentation and drying, roasting, and refining will have a significant impact on the flavor of the chocolate, and I’m sure many of us get used to a “house character”, good or bad, from some makers that traces through all of their origins.

In the balance, I think terroir matters more in chocolate than in beer, but is still probably somewhat overstated.

This potentially causes a bit of an issue for bean to bar chocolate, as single origin bars that ostensibly display terroir are still the spiritual center of the movement, even if sales don’t back that up. If terroir isn’t as important, does this matter? Mackenzie Rivers of Map Chocolate wrote a newsletter recently in which she said she thinks for most people, origin doesn’t matter at all. I think she’s probably right for casual chocolate fans, but either way…can most people actually recognize terroir in these origins, or is it more of a storytelling tool?

Both chocolate and beer have struggled to help consumers understand their reality as agricultural products in ways wine and coffee do not. This is precisely because they are processed in ways wine and coffee aren’t. Everyone knows what wine and coffee are made from—they see the ingredients. Beer’s and chocolate’s ingredients are both one step further removed from the public eye. Because of this, both have extra work to do to remind folks their ingredients are natural, are the labor of farmers, farm workers, and other agricultural workers (maltsters in the case of beer, for example), and are sensitive to climate—and climate change. That makes terroir precious and a bit tough to give up. We have to figure out storytelling around agriculture using something besides just the rosy, sacred connotation of terroir.

Quick little note here at the end: hops and cacao both grow in narrow latitudinal bands. For hops, that’s roughly between 35-55° north and south of the equator, and for cacao, that’s 0-20° north and south. This means there’s nowhere on Earth where the two can grow together (yet), though there are two countries that grow both in different locations: Australia and the United States.