Friday Beer Blogging – Green Beer You Can Drink Year-Round

File this under, doing good by living well. In the tradition of St. Patrick’s day the folks at Wired have decided to spotlight an entirely different type of green beer:

Brooklyn Brewery, located on Brewer’s Row in Brooklyn, New York, is one of a handful of breweries around the country that uses sustainable energy when producing its beer.

Its choice of method is wind power, which provides 100 percent of the brewery’s energy needs, making the 1,658,000 gallons of beer it produces green year-round. Brooklyn Brewery’s energy bills are 10 percent to 13 percent higher than they would be otherwise, but its operators say leaning on alternative energy just makes sense.

…It’s just one of many socially conscious programs that the $12 million beer company runs to make its beverages environmentally friendly.

It also pays farmers in New Jersey to swing by and pick up the “spent grain” — the remaining husks that are left over after brewing. The farmers then feed the nutritious grains to their livestock, making good use of Brooklyn Brewery’s waste.

…Brooklyn Brewery isn’t alone in its conservation efforts. New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins, Colorado, has developed a unique method that uses its waste to power its factory.

After producing its libations, New Belgium puts its waste water inside closed pools filled with anaerobic bacteria. The microbes feed on the water, rich in nutrients from the brewing process, and produce methane gas, which is then pumped back to the factory where it becomes electrical and thermal energy.

Right now, New Belgium meets 30 percent of its energy needs — between 40,000 and 60,000 kwh per month — through this cogeneration process. The remaining 70 percent comes from wind, which means no fossil fuels are burned making New Belgium’s various beers.

The used water, once cleaned by anaerobic microbes, is used in the factory for cooling and cleaning. Then the water is retreated and returned to the municipal system.

This sort of story makes me practically tear up, and no I’m not that kind of drunk. Sheesh. It just has that effect on me to find out that two breweries whic already make some of my favorite grog do it in a way that increases my great-grandchildrens’ opportunity to enjoy beer. I don’t mean that these guys will solve the problem of global sustainability by themselves, it’s more of a downpayment. Think of the dated tipping-point scheme – innovators have already worked out dozens of ways that we can go on doing business while minimizing waste and maximizing efficiency. Those guys usually suck at business so they’re mostly gone now. New Belgium and Brooklyn qualify as early adopters and possibly opinion leaders, applying green approaches that work for them and making it cool. The lessons learned by New Belgium and Brooklyn will eventually morph into a set of standard practices that hundreds of more conservative breweries out there can adopt with little risk to their operation. So if you already had in mind a Fat Tire or a Brooklyn Brown Ale, lift another one and feel good about yourself.

…

The organic tradition goes back at least as far in the wine world as it does in beer, in fact both beer and wine predate modern agriculture so the concept of non-organic wine seems like a relatively new thing. Sophisticates looking for a wine to match their feng shui look look instead to a winemaking trend called the biodynamic approach. What the heck is that?

[Biodynamics] has its roots in a series of lectures delivered by Austrian philosopher-scientist Rudolf Steiner in 1924. Steiner’s life mission was to bridge the gap between the material and spiritual worlds through the philosophical method. To this end, he created the ‘spiritual science’ of anthroposophy, which he used as the basis of the Waldorf school system that persists to this day.

…Key to biodynamics is considering the farm in its entirety as a living system. To this end, biodynamic farms are supposed to be closed, self-sustaining systems. Biodynamics also sees the farm in the context of the wider pattern of lunar and cosmic rhythms. In this holistic view, the soil is seen not simply as a substrate for plant growth, but as an organism in its own right. The idea of using synthetic fertilizers or pesticides is thus an anathema to biodynamic practitioners. Instead, they use a series of special preparations (see Table) to enhance the life of the soil, which are applied at appropriate times in keeping with the rhythms of nature. And disease is seen not as a problem to be tackled head-on, but rather as a symptom of a deeper malaise within the farm ‘organism’: correct the problem in the system and the disease will right itself.

Looking at the table in the link, you’ll find some odd things to spread on a field including: Oak bark fermented in the skull of a domestic animal; Flower heads of dandelion fermented in cow mesenter; Cow manure fermented in a cow horn, which is then buried and over-winters in the soil and Stinging nettle tea. I have no idea whether this works, in fact to me it sounds like it does to ‘organic’ what Madonna did to ‘Judaism.’ Apparently folks consider the rules somewhat flexible and vineyard-specific, so the methodology can get pretty wierd (and, for the lazy and fad-hungry, pretty close to ordinary organic).

Not having tried either kind of wine I will pass you on to Alder at Vinography, a cool wine blog that I just picked up the other day and heartily recommend. In this post he looks at biodynamics and other recent marketing gimmicks and comes away unimpressed.

Looking at trends in the wine and beer business it seems to me that we’ll be a much better off if the change happens the way it did at Brooklyn and New Belgium – in the back end of the shop, out of sight of the consumers and from a genuine interest in doing things in a more sustainable way. Being a liberal I wouldn’t mind a few government incentives to boost the profitability of people doing sustainable business, which would increase the number of folks who do things Brooklyn/New Belgium’s way out of smart business sense rather than as part of some marketing fad. Make green brewing profitable and the free market will save the Earth all on its own.