This St. Patrick’s Day, Drink Really Green Beer

Forget food coloring. This year, celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with a pint of truly green, eco-friendly brew.

What makes a brew eco-friendly? The same things that make a beer: energy, ingredients and distribution. Here’s how to find a guilt-free guzzle.

Energy

With all the heating and boiling of ingredients, brewing is an energy-intensive process, and in most cases that means fossil fuels. Reducing dependence on fossil fuels is the number one way breweries can reduce their carbon footprint and make a more eco-friendly beer. Look for breweries that reduce their energy consumption by using more efficient boilers, recycling heat energy back into the system, and using alternative energy such as wind and solar.

Good Green Beer Picks:

New Belgium Brewing, Fort Collins, CO: www.newbelgium.com

Bridgeport Brewing, Portland, OR: www.bridgeportbrew.com

Ingredients

At its most basic, beer is grain, hops and water.  Ideally, the grains and hops would be organically grown without the use of pesticides and herbicides. Unfortunately, these ingredients are often cost-prohibitive, making the beer too expensive to compete with non-green products. Or the best sources for organic grains may be overseas (New Zealand is an example), puffing up the carbon footprint with transport. Several brewers have committed to making some or all of their beers from organic grain – check out a partial list below.

After brewing, the spent grain and hops are a waste product; some breweries keep this out of the landfill by saving it and shipping it out as cattle feed.

Not surprisingly, brewing and bottling beer uses a lot of water. Some of it goes into the beer, but much of this water ends up as waste, and what a brewery does with this water can make a huge impact on the environment. Breweries that find ways to reduce the amount of water they use not only improve their bottom line, they reduce their eco impact.

Good Green Beer Picks:

Peak Organic Brewing Co., Portland, ME: www.peakbrewing.com

Wolaver’s Organic Ales, Otter Creek Brewing, Middlebury, VT: www.wolavers.com

Distribution

Getting your favorite beer from the brewery to the palm of your hand has huge environmental consequences – and opportunities. The production of bottles and cans is energy-intensive and creates a waste stream, trucking beer around the country guzzles fossil fuels, and keeping beer cold in the store shoots its carbon footprint through the roof.

What can you do? Think globally, drink locally.

Drinking at your favorite watering hole, where beer is distributed in kegs, is one way to reduce your impact – kegs last upwards of 10 years and can be re-used hundreds of times, eliminating bottles, cans and in-store refrigeration from the equation.

Want to drink your beer at home? Cart it home in a re-usable “growler,” a U.S. half gallon jug designed for transporting beer (not available in some states).

Even better, support your local brewery. Beer is best fresh, so drinking locally brewed beer doesn’t just help the planet – it usually tastes better, too. And with every sip you can feel good about reducing your carbon footprint and supporting your local economy.

Got a local brewery that also works to reduce their environmental impact? Bonus. Here in Southwest Virginia we’re lucky enough to have Shooting Creek Brewery (www.shootingcreekbrewery.com) a local organic farm that started brewing their own beer, even growing some of their own ingredients. They are now churning out a half dozen great beers; my favorite is their Buffalo Brown, named for the mountain looming above their farm near the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Now it’s your turn: comment below to tell us what green beer you’re drinking for St. Patty’s Day.