It’s a freezing, foggy morning outside the warehouse in northwestern Spain, but it’s warm inside, where warmth and LED lights keep 360 hop plants blooming as if it were late August.
Mounted on a towering grid system of cables and wires, these vigorous climbing plants are covered with delicate paper-green hops in full bloom, prized for giving beer its unique aroma and vibrant, refreshing bitterness.
Hop plants normally grown outdoors are part of a unique indoor farming project by Spanish startup Ekonoke, which has developed an alternative way of growing this climate-sensitive crop to preserve the drinkability of beer.
Rising temperatures and increasing droughts are making hop harvests in Europe increasingly unpredictable, falling yields and reducing the quality of alpha acids in their resins and oils, which are crucial to the taste and character of different beers, experts say.
“Climate change is affecting the field and last year we had a 40 percent drop in hop production in Europe,” said Giacomo Guala, hops policy adviser for Copa-Cogeca, which groups the European Union’s main farmer unions.
“It’s not raining when it should, or it’s raining too much when it shouldn’t, so predictability is no longer there,” he told AFP.
– High tech hops –
Brewers are already feeling this unpredictability.
Jose Luis Olmedo, head of research and development at Cosecha de Galicia, the innovation arm of Spanish brewer Hijos de Rivera, which produces Estrella Galicia beer, explained that having a stable supply of hops is “very important” because there is no alternative to delivering this bitterness. .
Having so far relied on field-grown hops, the Galicia-based brewer quickly realized the potential of home-grown hops by Ekonoke.
The startup said when it raised 4.2 million euros in investment rounds in 2022, a “significant” part of it came from the brewer.
It also caught the attention of AB InBev, the world’s largest beer producer, which participated in the startup accelerator program.
“What brewers are most interested in is the guaranteed supply of quantity and quality,” Ekonoke CEO Ines Sagrario said at the 1,200 square meter (13,000 square meter) pilot farm in Chantada. -February.
In 2019, they began experimenting in their Madrid laboratory, starting with four plants and scaling up to 24, shortening the growing time and aiming to “get to 20” using “15 times less water” than outdoors.
“In this tank, we control all environmental and nutrient parameters and lighting factors using LED lights to provide the plant with what it needs,” Sagrario said.
The lights mimic the different colors and intensity of sunlight at each stage of the growth cycle, bathing the fast-growing plants in an ambient purple glow.
– Halving the growth cycle –
The heady scent of hops wafts into the air as a huge vine full of hop cones is cut from the trellis, rolled to the ground and carried into a red harvester.
Grown hydroponically, vines are nurtured in a closed system that allows continuous reuse of nutrient-infused water and does not use pesticides, relying instead on tightly controlled access protocols.
“In the field, they can only harvest once a year, even though the cycle is six months, because you need the right growing conditions,” said Ana Saez, agronomist and chief operations officer.
“Because we can control and propagate the ‘spring’ here, we shorten the crop cycle to three months.”
Many trials have shown hops contain “more alpha acid per kilogram” than those in the field, Saez said, pointing to the abundance of the yellow powdery lupulin that clings to the cones.
By summer, three growing rooms will be in operation with more than 1,000 plants gradually maturing.
“Once we finish learning everything we need to learn in this pilot, we will build a full-scale industrial facility with 12,000 square meters of growing space,” said Sagrario, whose team of 12 people has managed to produce five different hops so far. kinds.
For Hijos de Rivera, this is a project of “strategic” importance and the brewer plans to have the facility fully operational “by the end of 2025,” Olmedo said.
Mirek Trnka, a bioclimatologist at the Czech Academy of Sciences, said hydroponics is a solution but will be difficult to scale to meet market demands.
“While hops are a minority crop, you would have to scale up your operations quite significantly to match current production with hydroponic growth globally,” he told AFP.
At Ekonoke, they see their role as using science and technology to preserve hop biodiversity and eventually develop new hybrids that “will yield greater quantity and quality using fewer resources.”
“People ask us if hop growers out there feel threatened by us, but we’re not threatening them. Climate change is threatening them,” Sagrario said.
hmw/CHZ/imm