Green Beer

Delving into Green Beer

In case the shamrocks and leprechauns haven’t given it away, St. Patrick’s day is here.  If you’re under the age of 10, you’re probably rather excited about your schoolroom being bedazzled with gold treasure, and if you’re over 21, you’re probably mostly excited about drinking some good stout beer with a large helping of corned beef and cabbage.

But, before you set out to conquer the supermarkets and fill your cart with some Irish lager, I’m hoping you’ll consider making that “green” beer actually green this year – in an environmentally friendly way.  Confused?  Think about it this way: according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), it takes approximately 1,500 gallons of water to produce just one barrel of beer.  To put that on a personal level, it takes about 19.8 gallons to produce one glass of your favorite beer. 

Not only that, if you look into the way most beer is manufactured, you’re going to see high levels of CO2 produced from the fermentation process, waste in the form of unused barley and hops, and a whole lotta energy being drained in the processing and packaging – not to mention a pretty hefty carbon footprint that comes about from hauling those glass bottles all over the country and keeping them chilled in coolers all the while.  And, worse still: if you’re buying beer in a bottle, there’s a good shot that the restaurant/bar will not recycle, which just adds salt to the wound.

Does this mean you shouldn’t buy/drink beer?  Absolutely not – that’s one of the perks of living in our day and age.  What it does mean is this: you have one more opportunity to green up your living, and St. Patrick’s Day would make a great place to start.  If you haven’t considered this before, here are some tips, as well as some favorite green breweries.

1)      Buy local.  This is pretty common sense. We attempt to buy our food locally to cut down on the carbon footprint, do the same with your beer. 

2)      Buy by the keg (go in on one with friends).  Even though you can recycle glass bottles, you never know if they actually will be recycled, and recycling itself takes valuable resources and energy.  Kegs are completely reusable with nothing that needs to be done in between use. 

3)      When out, choose a beer on tap.  Again, this eliminates the possibility that your bottle isn’t going to make it into a recycling bin.

4)      Buy organic.  Even though we all know organic does not necessarily equate to eco-friendly, it does eliminate the chance that your barley and hops were doused in pesticides and insecticides or nasty chemicals that are all harmful for our environment.

5)      Choose an eco-friendly brewery.  Even if you don’t live in a location where a local brewery is an option, purchasing your beer from a brewery that implements green practices is your next best option. 

Want some top picks?

Number one on my list is New Belgium Beer.  These guys hold nothing back when it comes to making a green beer.  Within their building: they primarily light with solar “light pipes;” they decided in 1999, to go with wind power, which, over the course of time has already saved eight million pounds of coal, in turn eliminating nearly 15 million pounds of CO2 that would have been released into the atmosphere.  When it comes to water, instead of routing wastewater to a city treatment plant, they extract the organic nutrients within the water and turn it into methane.  They then burn that methane as power!  When it comes to their brewing: they use organically grown ingredients; offer up spent hops and barley to local farmers for their cattle; and use their excess heat to melt snow and warm local public areas within the community. 

Another favorite of mine is the Alaskan Brewing Company.  These guys have a “carbon dioxide recovery system” that actually captures the gas they produce during fermentation and reuses it.  They also offer up 1% of their sales of their India Pale Ale to go towards protecting the Pacific Ocean through Clean Oceans Depend on Everyone (CODE).

A surprise brewery you probably didn’t expect to see on this list is actually Coors Brewing Company.  Coors recycles both its own wastewater as well as that of its entire home city: Golden, Colorado!  They also sell approximately 600 million pounds of cattle feed to local famers and sell somewhere around 1.5 million gallons of ethanol to the Colorado oil refineries.  And, better still, since 1996, Coors has been converting wasted recycled beer into automotive fuel!

If you’re near Chicago, try the Goose Island Green Line Pale Ale.  It’s only distributed locally, only produced in kegs, and they only make a limited amount at a time to cut down on refrigeration costs, but if you can get your hands on some, you should!

For New Yorkers, go for Brooklyn Brewery, the first of any New York company to use 100% wind powered energy.  They are able to prevent 500 pounds of nitrogen oxide, 1,500 pounds of sulfur dioxide and 335,000 pounds of CO2 from entering the atmosphere.

There you have it.  Instead of pouring in a drip or two of green food coloring this St. Patrick’s, go for a beer that’s truly green, inside and out.

 Author Tara Alley is a freelance writer who enjoys blogging and writing about finding creative ways to live more sustainably. She is currently researching and writing about eco-friendly Handpresso Espresso Makers. You can follow her on Twitter @hopesiempre.