Huckley

HOW ICELAND'S CRAFT BEER BOOM SURVIVED THE CLIMATE CHAOS By Emerole Clinton The thermometer outside Borg Brugghús brewery reads 18°C. It's July in Reykjavík, and that should be a cause for celebration—summer in Iceland rarely breaks 15 degrees. But inside the brewery, Jóhann Jónsson is staring at a failed barley crop with the kind of quiet devastation usually reserved for funerals. "This was supposed to be our flagship harvest," he says, running his hand through stunted stalks that should be waist-high by now. "Local barley, grown 40 kilometers from here. We've been planning this beer for two years. But the plants couldn't handle the heat." Iceland's craft beer revolution—50+ breweries launched since beer was fully legalized in 1989—is colliding with an unexpected enemy: climate change. The same warming that's melting glaciers and extending growing seasons is wreaking havoc on the crops that brewers depend on. Barley, the backbone of beer, th...

THE LAST MAPLE SYRUP HARVEST: VERMONT PRODUCERS FACE WARMING WINTERS By Emerole Clinton Tom Bouchard checks the thermometer outside his Vermont sugarhouse for the third time this morning: 42°F at 7 AM, forecast high of 55°F. It should be 28 degrees at night, 35 during the day—the freeze-thaw cycle that makes sap flow. But it's mid-March 2024, and this is the fourth winter in six years where temperatures have stayed stubbornly, disastrously warm. "No freeze means no flow," Bouchard explains, stirring a pot of last season's syrup in his century-old sugarhouse outside Montpelier. "Sap only runs when the tree freezes overnight and thaws during the day. That pressure changes —freeze, thaw, freeze, thaw—pushes sap down from the branches and out through our taps. But when it just stays... warm? Like this? The trees don't know what to do. Neither do we." Bouchard's family has made maple syrup on this land since 1847. Five generations of Bouchards have tapped...

SCOTLAND'S WHISKY INDUSTRY BETS BIG ON BARLEY THAT DOESN'T EXIST YET By Emerole Clinton The seed vault is underground, naturally—built into a hillside in the Scottish Highlands, temperature-controlled to 4°C year-round, humidity regulated to the percentage point. Inside, Dr. Fiona MacLeod stands in front of a wall of small glass vials, each containing 50-100 seeds. Forty different varieties of barley. Only three exist in commercial production. The other 37 are experiments. "This is our climate insurance," says MacLeod, a plant geneticist with the James Hutton Institute, Scotland's agricultural research center. She picks up a vial labeled HRI-2047-X—a prototype barley bred to tolerate wetter, warmer Scotland. "If we're right, this will be the backbone of Scottish whisky in 2040. If we're wrong, we start over." Scotland's whisky industry is worth £5 billion annually. It employs 40,000 people, exports to 180 countries, and is the nation's la...

WHEN THE CREDITS LIE: On Ensemble Films That Erase the People Who Made Them There is a scene towards the end of Ocean's Eleven where the camera lingers on each member of the crew as they walk away from the Bellagio, one by one, into the Las Vegas crowd. It is a love letter to an ensemble — the film stopping to say: look at all of them, every one of them mattered. It is also, if you have spent any time thinking about how ensemble films actually get made, a mild irony. Because the history of ensemble filmmaking is, in large part, a history of deciding whose name goes above the title and whose disappears into the scroll. The ensemble film promises democracy. What it usually delivers is a hierarchy with better lighting. This is not a straightforward argument about star billing or studio politics, though those are real enough. It is an argument about something more specific: the gap between what ensemble films claim about collective action and what they actually do with the people perfo...