On a bright day this fall, tractors crisscrossed Gayle Goschie's farm about an hour outside Portland, Oregon. Goschie is in the beer business a fourth-generation hops farmer. Fall is the off-season, when the trellises are bare, but recently, her farming team has been adding winter barley, a relatively newer crop in the world of beer, to their rotation, preparing barley seeds by the bucketful.
Climate change threatens the cultivation in Europe of aromatic hops which gives beer its bitterness, according to a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications.