Cool Beer for a Warming World

To counter climate change, brewer Carlsberg uses science to score sustainable ingredients

- Gautam Naik

Zoran Gojkovic holds up a glass of golden, foam-topped lager against the light before taking a long, slow draught. "The main flavor is crispness," says the master brewer for Carlsberg A/S. "It has a slight malty note with a noble hop aroma." That description could fit hundreds of lagers.

What makes this experimental Carlsberg recipe distinctive is the use of a barley variety engineered to thrive under high heat and water stress-or, to put it another way, a cool beer for a warm planet.

For a $600 billion global brewing industry being assailed by climate change, such advances can't happen fast enough. Barley yields are falling. Fresh water is harder to find. And good-quality hops the green flower that gives beer its bitter bite-are under threat from scorching heat waves.

Climate change is hitting most food and drink supply chains. At the current rate of global warming, average crop yields worldwide for corn could fall 24% by late this century, according to a 2022 report by NASA. Other research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2017 concluded that without adaptation measures, each degree of higher temperature would, on average, reduce yields of wheat by 6%, rice by 3.2%, soybean by 3.1% and corn by 7.4%.

"Climate change is the most substantial challenge to food security in human history," says Cory Fowler, special envoy for global food security at the US Department of State. "Are domesticated crops adapted to climate change? It's highly unlikely." Many companies are turning to technology to help them cope. In 2022, Bayer AG introduced a "short stature" corn designed to survive high winds. In 2021, Nestlé SA said it had developed "low-carbon" coffee varieties with up to 50% higher yields. Argentina's Bioceres Crop Solutions Corp. is awaiting government approval to cultivate drought-tolerant wheat in the US.