| Martina |
10-02-2012 12:36 PM |
Here's the transcript from the NPR thing I heard re making beer from cheatgrass. Actually it's just a small part of a a Science Friday edition of Talk of the Nation called Fires and Invasive Grass in the Great Basin.
Quote:
FLATOW: . . . there is somebody who's actually thought of what can we do with all these cheatgrass. And Tye Morgan is a biogeochemist and a homebrewer. She makes beer. And she said why not turn the cheatgrass into beer? And that's what they have been doing. She is also the owner of the Bromus - of Bromus Tech in Reno, Nevada, and she joins us from KUNR. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. Morgan. Hi, there.
TYE MORGAN: Hello. How it's going?
FLATOW: Fine. How successful have you been in turning cheatgrass into beer?
MORGAN: Well, I've actually had great success turning cheatgrass into beer. We have actually made a 5 percent alcohol beer, and it actually tastes very well. I've had a lot of taste testers going through the process.
FLATOW: I had my test myself today just, so I could...
MORGAN: What...
FLATOW: I had a taste test myself, so I can verify.
(LAUGHTER)
MORGAN: So what do you think?
FLATOW: It's delicious. It's very good.
MORGAN: Yeah. It's quite shocking that people identify it as beer, first off. That was one of my big questions, was when we start making beer from it, what - are people going to identify it as beer? Are they going to identify it as some other product going on? So we hit our mark when they said, hey, this is beer.
And they said, oh, this is pretty good. You know, what is this? Is this like an amber ale, or is this like, you know, like a Boston lager? And I said, no. It's actually made from cheatgrass. And they kind of look at me and go, well, what's cheatgrass? So we've had really good success.
We're trying to get started in the harvesting process, working with the BLM. And our goal really isn't to turn cheatgrass into a crop, but to use - cheatgrass beer is almost like a land management tool, something that people could use as - they're kind of piggybacking the idea of green strips(ph).
So when we have these large wildfires, you get high nitrogen spikes following - two years post-following the wildfire, you will get a huge burst of cheatgrass. I say we come in there, and we do perimeter harvesting. When you take the perimeters out, you're going to reduce the seed bank. And by reducing the seed bank, we can follow the nitrogen, see when those seed banks get low enough, and then we could come in with some good restoration efforts at that point. But you can't go out and see when you have, you know, 65,000 seeds per square meter. You're just not going to get success out of that.
FLATOW: Both Jen and Mike are shaking their heads in agreement.
(LAUGHTER)
FLATOW: You - how do you make beer? Out of which part of the cheatgrass do you make the beer?
MORGAN: I just take the seed. It's right off the top of the plant. So when we actually go out and do the harvesting, my criteria of the plant, it has to be at least six inches tall. And if it's six inches tall, when I go out with my vacuum, because that's the - when I first started this as a home brew, I'm taking a vacuum to the top of the seeds. And you don't want to suck up any soil. You want to leave the plant system intact, because as bad as cheatgrass is, there are still some good things to it.
If you have a fire that comes through, it's going to leave bare ground. Bare ground is your enemy in the Great Basin. We have bad wind erosion problems. And if you can get that plant in there, at least it's going to be a soil - at the very minimum, a soil stabilizer.
So I don't want to remove the plant. I just want to take the seeds. That's the highest part of the nitrogen in the plant. Just, you know, harvest two years in a row. Monitor the nitrogen, and then come in with restoration efforts, because cheatgrass will engineer the soil for itself.
FLATOW: So the cheatgrass seed...
MORGAN: It will...
FLATOW: ...is actually a good replacement for barley in the beer process?
MORGAN: Well, I don't want to say it's a good replacement for barley, because barley is an established agricultural crop. And the idea with cheatgrass is that it's kind of a migratory, unsustainable crop. We are - you know, the goal is to have a harvest way that is sustainable to the environment, but is not sustainable to cheatgrass.
And, like Mike was saying, you can only harvest two months out of the year. And you're not going to get the same weight that you would for barley. And so your - with cheatgrass beer, you know, to really have an impact, you need 1,200 tractors for two months going, and that's just not possible. So it's a niche market that has, you know, the potential for people to know every time they're drinking their beer, they're contributing to saving the desert...
(LAUGHTER)
MORGAN: ...or saving the (unintelligible).
(APPLAUSE)
FLATOW: As if we all need another reason to drink beer.
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