Organic Certification

[Fred Scheer]

HI Brewers:

I have a request............A friend of mine and we discussed ORGANIC BEERS and Organic Certification in TN, or somewhere else.
We know about the 95% rule etc.

Any ideas, web sites etc that you can drow to us?

Thanks

Fred

[lhall]

Hey Fred, you can talk to someone at the TN Dept of Agriculture. I looked into earlier this year. There is no agency in TN to inspect and certify organic, but there are ones in NC, KY, and MS. It looked like a good bit of trouble to go through for the seasonal organic beer I was considering. I think we will go the route of saying it was made with organic materials and try to get that to work.

The guys at Pisgah in Asheville are organic, and can tell you alot about what they had to do.

[Sulfur]

seasonal

That's what I did for a seasonal. I used 100% organic ingredients and labeled it as such.

[Fred Scheer]

Organic

Thanks Guys

[BeersmithMT]

Fred,

You can go to the National Organic Program website and find a list of approved certifying agents, they may be private or government (ie. state ag dept). The certifying agent does not have to be from your state.

As far as making organic claims go, it is my understanding that you cannot make any organic claims if the process is not certified. You can use organic ingredients in your beer if you so choose, you just can't advertise it.

[MaltAlchemist]

Organic Certification

The closest would be Clemson University. Contact Brad Stancil for more info:
bstanci@clemson.edu We are in the process of being certified. The paperwork is like filling out the Fed brewer's notice. most procedures for organic paperwork are similar to the way you need to trace beer/ ingredients for Homeland Security, so you have those procedures in place. I think its $400 a year. If you go 100% organic then you dont need to worry about procedures to prevent cross contamination of nonorganic to organic ingredients. You will need to use peracetic acid to sanitize. and if you are doing a organic seasonal, before brewing you will need to run organic grain to flush out the mill/ auger and dump or use in last batch. Also you CANNOT use yeast from an nonorganic beer (I believe) you must propagate using organic wort. the 95% rule is by weight so hops can be non-organic if under 5% by weight. Hope this helps!