Minnesota breweries are finding ways to 'climate-proof' their beer
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When most people crack open a cold beer, climate change isn’t something that’s on their minds. But the 200-plus craft breweries in Minnesota are beginning to feel the pressure of climate change as extreme weather makes the grains needed for brewing harder to grow.
Sandy Boss Febbo owns Bang Brewing, an organic brewery in St. Paul. Founded in 2013, Bang focuses on sustainability and environmental responsibility.
“It's a small facility designed to be incredibly efficient with minimal materials,” she said. “Every business decision that we make is an opportunity to consider our impact.”
But running an eco-minded brewery has meant taking a closer look at the sustainability of the grain used to make beer.
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Federal data shows that barley, a common beer malt, has struggled over the last four decades. In the mid-1980s, American farms produced around 600 million bushels of barley each year. In 2025, that number dropped to just over 140 million bushels. And while changes in the market are a large reason for the drop, climate variability is cutting yields for barley and oats across the Upper Midwest.
For farmers, the extreme weather that comes with climate change is the most damaging. Minnesota has seen a sharp rise in severe weather over the past several years — including floods, droughts, severe storms and wildfires. Kurt Kimber, owner of Kimber Contours in Farmington, has experienced the impact firsthand.
“I guess one thing that I really notice is that the opportunities to get out and do your field work, it seems like those windows are tending to shrink,” he said. “Then you have to get more aggressive about when you go into the field. So maybe you go into the field when it's too wet, or you're gonna miss another window, and delaying your planting has a significant impact on your yields.”
Kimber and Boss Febbo have partnered with the University of Minnesota to find more climate resilient alternatives for malting grains. One of them is a tall golden brown field grass called Kernza.
Unlike traditional grains that need to be replanted every year, Kernza is perennial; it stays in the ground for several seasons and puts down deep roots. Its resilience is what makes the crop promising.
“If you’ve ever heard about Kernza, you’ve heard about its deep roots,” Kimber said. “Its roots are about 10 feet deep once established. It’s really robust against these high-intensity rainfall events. And again, that’s really a big threat that farming is facing — these high-intensity rainfall events and the threat of soil erosion that comes with them. So Kernza is really a solution to that.”
Kernza has other environmental benefits as well. Studies have shown Kernza dramatically reduces nitrates from the soil that could otherwise pollute nearby water sources. Kernza can also sequester 300 to 1,000 pounds of atmospheric carbon per acre. Bang has been brewing with the grain for nearly a decade.
“That first beer really opened our eyes. We did a blond ale with very light hopping on it and it was delicious,” Boss Febbo said. “It was exciting to work with a perennial grain, the first that we had ever had an opportunity to consider, and to find that it lends itself really well to beer.”
But Kernza is still a niche crop, and growing it comes with challenges. The grain is smaller than wheat, harder to harvest and more expensive than traditional malted grains, costing breweries that want it roughly three times as much as standard malts like barley and oats.
“It’s developing a new market for something that hasn’t existed before,” Kimber said. “An expression that is often used is chicken and egg, talking about market development, where you have to try to get the demand and the supply in sync. If the price is too high, nobody wants to buy it. If the price is too low, nobody wants to grow it.”
Still, some brewers are embracing it. Today, nearly 20 breweries are experimenting with Kernza beers.
“It just feels incumbent upon us to do what we can to just think about that impact,” Boss Febbo said. “Honestly, if we can make it happen at this scale without the benefit of economy of scale, there's no reason a larger business can't do more. We're in our 13th year, still expanding, bit by bit, organic growth, just like our organic beer, and it's working.”
