Earth Day--How to Drink Beer and Save the World!

Today is Earth Day, and I thought it'd be cool to do a little piece on beer and the environment. Regardless of whether you believe in global warming/science (low blow, but it needed to be said) or not, there's no question that we all need to do our part to conserve our natural resources and ensure a sustainable future for our children and our children's children (our children's children's children are on their own though--suckers!). I personally plan on celebrating Earth Day by having a beer or two tonight and then recycling the bottles--boo yah! Or better yet, maybe I should drink some homebrew from the keg, thus not producing any waste.

So, how can you drink beer and save the world? Well, I'd start by reading Christopher Mark O'Brien's tome, Fermenting Revolution: How to Drink Beer and Save the World. I read Fermenting Revolution in college while working on a business plan for a "green" brewery for a writing course I was taking. The book is a really interesting read, and I'd definitely recommend it. O'Brien's website lists 7 reasons beer saves the world. In lieu of summarizing each of them here, you can take the extra effort to click the links and read O'Brien's explanations:
1. Brewers invented recyclable aluminum cans
2. Real Ale slows climate change
3. Fair Trade beer benefits small farmers
4. Beer builds sustainable architecture
5. Beer is patriotic
6. Beer saves water
7. Hemp beer is the answer

During my research for the "green" brewery project, I discovered all sorts of interesting information regarding beer's environmental impact and how brewers manage that impact. Brewing is an energy and resource intensive process. Heating/maintaining high temperatures as well as rapid cooling in the brewhouse all consume an inordinate amount of energy. On top of that, breweries use incredibly large amounts of water between what goes in to the beer itself and the water used for cleaning and cooling. A byproduct of fermentation is of course CO2, and though not much of a concern for smaller breweries, that CO2 needs to be released somewhere. Between yeast sludge and spent grains, there's also a lot of waste produced during brewing.

There are number of things brewers can do to combat these issues, and the feasibility of the solutions many times vary based on the brewery size (and hence the amount of available capital). Here are few environmentally friendly practices that the beer industry has adopted over the years:
1. Saving reserves of hot water to be used for cleaning and/or mashing at a later time. For example, cold water used to cool hot wort in a heat exchanger (and thus becoming hot) can be used to cleaning equipment later or even used as strike water for the mash in the next batch of beer.
2. Capturing and purifying CO2 produced during fermentation to later be used to carbonate the beer.
3. Giving spent grain to farmers to be used as cattle feed. It's a win-win relationship: farmers get free feed for their cattle and brewers get their wasted grain trucked off for free.
4. Recently in the news, Sierra Nevada has begun using spent yeast and waste beer to create high-quality ethanol, which can then be used to fuel automobiles.
5. Using solar and/or wind energy to help power a brewery's operations.

There are number of small breweries doing big things to reduce the impact making great beer has on the environment. Of particular note are Sierra Nevada, New Belgium, and Otter Creek, just to name a few. So, get outside and have a beer for Mother Earth today! And next time you have a pint of the golden elixir, remember drink beer and save the world!