Slate, June 2026
As I listened to the calm cadence of Morgan Freeman’s voice narrating yet another cataclysmic extinction event in Netflix’s recent miniseries The Dinosaurs, my mind was necessarily on the Jurassic period. But rather than focusing on the famous land-before-time megafauna and their demise at the hands of the 2-million-year rainstorm of the Carnian pluvial episode, I was admiring the impact of the prehistoric microbes that were their contemporaries. The Steven Spielberg–produced simulation had inconsiderately left them off-screen, but the light Pilsner I nursed had likely been poured over their fossilized remains.
Diatoms—a variety of tiny, single-celled algae that first emerged during the age of the dinosaurs—are a key component of the modern brewing industry, and a not-insignificant part of why your favorite beer looks and tastes the way it does. But that may be about to change. Clouds are forming in beer across the world, and brewers are increasingly abandoning the ancient algae that can clear them up.
