Sustainable people, sustainable beer

Food for thought: the amount of water required to brew one keg of beer can be as much as 232 gallons. That is 15 times the amount of water as finished product. The current standard in breweries is generally 6 gallons water per 1 gallon beer. That may seem like a ridiculously high amount, but you have to consider all the processes that go on in a brewery, from cleaning, sanitizing, cooling, actual brewing and evaporation loss, more cleaning, etc. Wouldn't it make sense to reuse some of that water?

Long Trail Brewing Company of Bidgewater Corners, Vt. does just that. Through a complicated in-house filtration system, they use just 2 gallons of water per 1 gallon of beer. That's not all, they also collect all the steam given off during the brewing process, collect the water and the heat itself and use it to start the next brew.

They also sell all their spent grains (the barley left over from brewing) to local dairy farmers as cow feed for 1/10th the cost of traditional feed. Starting April 22nd, they will be switching to 100 percent renewable energy made from cow waste, which they probably stole from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. They're even making their event tasting glasses out of corn because it will biodegrade in less than a month.

Long Trail isn't the only brewery that dabbles in self sufficiency. New Belgium Brewery of Ft. Collins, CO is the first wind powered brewery and their waste water accounts for 15 percent of their energy through methane gas use. They're members of "1 Percent For the Planet"; 1 percent of their total revenue goes to environmental non-profit organizations. They also give every employee a custom bike after a year, to encourage less unnecessary driving.

You're going to start to see more and more breweries following in their footsteps in the upcoming years, as brewers, like consumers, become more aware of their own impact on the environment. This isn't one big marketing gimmick to entice the tree huggers to buy their beer. These people actually care about their environment.

Beer is basically a 100 percent farm-originated product. The raw materials that are harvested require little processing before they are shipped off to a brewery. Barley gets malted, wherein it is soaked, germinated, dried and kilned. Hops get baled and dried for a few months before they can be used. Water gets filtered and treated with minor adjustments depending on the source. In the production of lambics even the yeast comes off the farm, sometimes from the skin of local fruit.

To a brewer, taking care of the land and the environment is simply a good idea, not only for the continuation of good materials, but for the land they love.

This week, I don't have any beer recommendations. Instead, I want you to do something sustainable. Grab a couple of those reusable grocery bags or replace all your old light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs. Get a tap water filter and a good water bottle instead of buying cases of the stuff. Ride your bike to the package store instead of driving. Or you could even make your own beer, which will not only use far less energy, but taste better too. Some sustainability efforts are more enticing than others.

Until next time, Sláinte!