In the small town of Ava in southern Illinois, brewers Marika Josephson and Aaron Kleidon take a look outside when they need ingredients for their brewery. With a garden on their property and a “commitment to sourcing their hops and malt close to home,” Scratch Brewery “is part of a new movement of breweries that want to use foraged beers—beverages brewed with wild ingredients sourced hyper-locally—to educate drinkers about agriculture,” says Civil Eats.
The approach shuns the usual approach of relying on the commercially grown mix of ingredients, such as hops, barley and wheat, commonly used by craft brewers throughout the nation. “Every beer we brew is an opportunity to tell a story about a plant or a process,” said Josephson. A growing number of breweries are experimenting with foraged beers; only a small number of them make foraged beer their main output. Civil Eats says the Illinois brewery may use “elements like burdock, dandelion, turmeric, hickory bark, maple leaves, and sumac berries, as well as dozens of other wild botanicals” in making its beer.
“As consumer interest in local products and farm-to-table foods continues to develop in the U.S., craft beer drinkers are catching on to the foraged beer movement as brewers put intensely local beers back on the map—and as the world’s largest beer companies are tapping into the demand for craft beers,” said Civil Eats.