Terroir need not affect our beer. A feature of the postmodern era is that we can easily choose to avoid that sense of place—in fact, that’s become our default position as brewers.
The effects of soil and weather on hops and barley are muted into useful consistency by blending and processing to spec. Yeast catalogs are fetishistic, promising the ability to ferment any sort of style from anywhere else in the world. We strip our water down to nothing and rebuild, aiming to imitate profiles from any other place and time besides our own. Right to our doorsteps, we order tropical adjuncts grown on the other side of the planet.
Does that mean that terroir is irrelevant to beer? No. It only means that terroir has become a choice. It is the choice to limit your options, to be stubborn about using something that comes from your place, to re-embrace an old-fashioned kind of sincerity—and, in the process, to produce something that nobody else can.