Toast To The Planet: Carbon Offset Suds
The Tasmanian Awards for Environmental Excellence were announced last week, and with them came one of the most comforting headlines imaginable to a fun-living green community: environmentally friendly beer was one of the stars of the night. The Cascade Brewery not only uses entirely local ingredients in their production processes, but they also offer a 100% carbon offset beer, Tasmanian Purity, that’s the the capstone of a program that’s reduced their emissions by 16% over three years.
Of course, while this is good news because it lays out a practice which the copycat-mad business world can latch on to, it’s not immediately helpful to American consumers, or anywhere else that it would be considered a bit odd for the beer bottle to feature a Tasmanian devil. One more endearing thing about Cascade? If you go to their website, the beer isn’t pushed as ‘environmentally friendly’ at all–greenwashing must not have hit the shores of Australia just yet.
But What’s An American To Do?
Fortunately, breweries tend to be some of the more progressive institutions in American society–a trait left over from when they were forced to fight for their right to exist. Unfortunately, the U.S. is also home to several mega-brewers, all of whom understand the business sense behind greenwashing (looking at you, Coors). It doesn’t help much if you can’t tell the difference between the friendly, local brewer, and the corporate monstrosity that’s shipping in beer from 600 miles away and buys ingredients worldwide. So who’s among the best in the business? Sierra Nevada. The California-based brewer powers their entire operation with fuel cells, which run in tandem with boilers to provide heat for the numerous needs of brewing beer. They also happen to have a recycling program that’s unlike any other in the U.S., converting some 528,000 pounds of glass into something OTHER than landfill fodder.
California, Awesome. So My Green Beer Can Travel 3,000 Miles By Truck.
Not quite–although Sierra Nevada has the best programs in the nation, there are other eco-friendly brewers nationwide. Brooklyn Brewery in New York is powered completely by wind turbines, and hosts a mini-wind farm on their property. New Belgium in Colorado offers longtime employees a bike to travel to and from work on, as well as pioneering some innovative uses of “gray” water in their plant and hosting a methane power plant that’s run by the bacteria used in beer production. These are, of course, just two of the biggest and best operations; the best research may yet be done at a barstool near you.
Carbon Offset Beer Wins Award (ABC News)
Operation Greenbrew (Green Daily)
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Funny that people think 'eco' when they think tasmania, especially when you consider the government approved pulp mill being built down there; http://www.wilderness.org.au/campaigns/forests/...
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