“How 5 Breweries Are Embracing Sustainable Brewing”

In other news: Beer.

Monday was Earth Day, so, being the devoted man of journals that I am, I put together a report based on conversations I’ve had with multiple voices at multiple breweries across the country on the subject of sustainability. Point blank: Beer produces a lot of waste. What happens to that waste? I’ve heard of brewers sending spent hops to pig farmers, because as anyone who’s seen Snatch knows, pigs eat anything, and if they’ll eat people, they’ll eat spent hops; Tree House, one of my favorites, found ways to reuse waste water to clean equipment (though not to brew beer, because clean as you can get waste water, you can’t get it that clean). And so on.

I didn’t get a chance to touch base with Tree House, but I did talk to lovely people at New Belgium, Odell, Allagash, Maine Beer Company, and Brewery Vivant (my favorite new-to-me-personally brewery of the year), and learned a lot about both the processes of sustainable brewing and, much more importantly, the philosophies of sustainable brewing. 

You can read the full piece over at Hop Culture.