Current Event - Sustainable Beer

I've been trying to take a personal approach in my current events, choosing to report on things that relate sustainability to my personal interests and things that are relevant in my daily life. To me, it is important not only to learn about sustainability as a business concept or a scientific theory, but as something that can and should be incorporated into the average citizen's life. In order to do this, public interest must be piqued in some way. Taking the perspective of the consumer and thinking, "what would make me care about sustainability?", has been helping me see how to market sustainability as an approachable and appealing concept to people outside of the university classroom.

So, with that in mind, my current event this week is about something near and dear to my heart: beer! I love drinking beer as much as the next college student, but outside of school I also bartend at a local taphouse. The microbrew industry is thus a world I am constantly exposed to, so naturally I have a very keen interest in the conjunction of sustainability and beer, two of my favorite things.

I have read many articles on the "greenest beers in America", but I chose this one to report on from Where The Wild Grows because it was published recently, and it does not rank the breweries on it's list, understanding that size, capacity, and funding can limit the scope of a business's sustainability efforts.



The Most Sustainable Breweries in the U.S.

• Bell's Brewery
• Anderson Valley Brewing Co.
• Boulevard Brewing Co.
• Eel River Brewing
• Full Sail Brewing
• Brooklyn Brewery
• Uinta Brewing Co.
• Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.
• New Belgium Brewing Co.
• Great Lakes Brewing Co.

Sustainability is becoming a benchmark in the craft beer industry, and most of these breweries have adopted the basic "green" habits such as using recycled content in their packaging and increasing recyclability of their products after use, allowing spent hops to be used as feed or fertilizer for local farms, and many are also adopting renewable energy sources, most notably solar.

Sierra Nevada and New Belgium can hardly be called microbreweries; they are two of the most widely-known craft beer brands in the U.S., but both have used their success to expand their sustainability efforts to their fullest potential.

Sierra Nevada has been hailed as one of the greenest businesses in the nation, but what is notable, especially in light of this class, is that they engage in many of their efficiency and environmental efforts not because it's trendy or responsible, but because it saves them money! They have recognized that being sustainable has huge cost savings for businesses, a concept many are still slow to realize. New Belgium in particular shows effective marketing techniques in its extreme transparency; they publish their resource use and waste metrics on their website and are publicly undergoing an industry waste-stream audit.

I would like to mention Full Sail Brewing, makers of the popular "Session" lager, because they are local to the Northwest and have achieved the incredible feat of having the lowest water-to-beer ratio on the market. At 2.5 gallons of water per beer, and an onsite water treatment plant (Eel River Brewing, too!),  Full Sail takes resource conservation very seriously.

As I mentioned, I particularly love this sustainable beer concept because it is becoming not only an accepted facet of the industry, but an expected one as well, from both the brewers and the customers. Delicious beer with a small ecological footprint, it doesn't get much better than that!