How Green is Your Beer?

For black Friday, we go green.  Via John Foyston comes the news that breweries can now track their environmental impact via a program designed by the Institute for Environmental Research and Education in Washington state.  Not only that, but they can list the details on their labels:

The eco-labels, produced through the Earthsure Brewers software, show "life cycle assessments" also known as Type III Environmental Production Declarations....

"The (information is) displayed in a similar manner like the nutrition label on food," said the IERE's Colleen Barta. "Links are used to help consumers understand what the impact categories mean."

The labels report footprints in the carbon, water and energy realms. In Oregon, Hopworks Urban Brewing and Fort George Brewery have adopted the labels.

The labels list a bunch of highly technical and obscure stats which meant nothing to even a greenie like me.  So I tracked back to the IERE's original definitions (pdf) and had a look.  Not only do Fort George and Hopworks plan to use the labels, they actually helped develop the criteria, which are comprehensive and deeply involved.  The include all environmental impacts (air pollution, water and chemicals use,) of the entire life-cycle of beer, from barley field back to cow field with the spent grains.  For example, "it includes transportation of chemicals and seed to the farm and application of fertilizers and pesticides, and any emissions on the farm (e.g. N2O emissions from nitrogen fertilizer)."  If a brewery uses, say, coffee in one of its beers, those ingredients are subject to the same standards.  It includes the footprint at the maltster, the footprint of packaging manufacture, delivery and transportation costs--in essence, every conceivable jot of energy used to make a pint of beer.  The list of impacts goes on for pages, and the whole IERE document is 35 pages long.

So now we get back to that label and its obscure measures.  In some cases, the term's meaning is easy enough to figure (water use), but the numbers aren't.  In other cases, like "Eutrophication," the whole thing is meaningless.  They do provide definitions for each measure.  For example:

8.4 Eutrophication is the overgrowth of biomass caused by the anthropogenic release of nutrients, particularly fixed nitrogen and phosphorus. Eutrophied water bodies show early effects in te rms of species distribution and toxic algal blo oms, and ultimately as algae decompose eutrophication causes oxygen depletion leading to fish kills. Large portions of the world’s water bodies are subject to eutrophication seasonally. Most causes of excess nutrient releases are agriculture, human and animal wastes, and combustion processes. Beer and all food products contribute to eutrophication.

8.5 Ecotoxicity represent direct effects of releases of toxic materials organisms. It is anticipated that toxic materials will be emitted during the production and application of pesticides and fertilizers and during the transportation of ingredients, packaging and beer in packaging. These shall be evaluated using the Usetox, latest version, as expressed in the TRACI model

Unfortunately, although IERE describes each dimension, it doesn't give a scale to judge whether, to use Hopworks' example, 1.2 CTUs of toxicity is good or bad. Perhaps that's on the way--it will be critical if these labels are going to communicate anything to the public. Even this step is praiseworthy, though.  Breweries have been among the best citizens in terms of monitoring their environmental impact.  Any effort to quantify that impact and make the data publicly available is impressive--it shows breweries are willing to put their performance under scrutiny.  Fort George and Hopworks get special credit for working to create the definitions.  Good on you, folks--

Alternate View: The Downsides of Returnable Bottles

Alan Taylor, a talented, German-trained Oregon brewer now in the process of founding his own joint, had a fascinating comment I wanted to highlight.  It came in response to my post about Double Mountain's new bottling line and their effort use returnable bottles.  I said:

In Belgium, they all used returnable bottles.  Everyone.  Remarkably, they get over 90% return rates, and the bottles survive many, many refillings.  (Look at your next bottle of Orval and see if it isn't worn at the wide spot.)...  When I asked them about returnable bottles, Belgians were never convinced it was enormously more green than our system--using a bottle once, grinding it up, melting it back into a bottle, and sending it back out--but I have a hard time seeing how.

Alan sees how.  Here's his comment:

First off, Matt is a great guy, makes great beers, and I trust his call on his system. I can’t wait to see the bottling line.

My comment is a bit long, but some readers might be interested to know why most craft brewers aren't working with used bottles. For some perspective: I worked in a smaller Bavarian brewery in 1998 (20,000 bbl/year sold in a radius of about 20 miles) where they did clean their bottles in a massive bottle washer, which sucked down tons of energy and used lots of water and chemicals. The brewery had to store new glass in addition to the used glass due to lost or broken bottles, so they dedicated a lot of space to holding the bottles on site.

When I was there, the Germans were using the NRW bottle almost exclusively. That helped things a bit. The consumer would buy a reusable plastic case holding twenty 0.5 L bottles, schlepp that home, drink the beer, then schlepp the empty case back. If the retailer returned the cases properly, the brewer would have 20 of his own bottles in his own plastic case (I never worked with a female brewer there, so forgive the use of the masculine pronoun). With one bottle type, you could live with having a retailer send you the wrong case, but you still had to pay shipping to return it to the other brewery. Mark H pointed out the problem with branded glass. That was taking hold in Germany in 1998 and has become even more prevalent, which makes it harder for them as well. So I totally understand the lack of enthusiasm from Jeff’s Belgian brewing friends.

Turning to our craft brewers, we are lacking the infrastructure of selling bottles in a reusable case, using a single bottle type (22s are the closest for this, where almost all of the them are the same bottle type) for 12 oz bottles, having space in the retailer’s storage area to hold all of the cases and bottles returning each day (Germany doesn’t have 50 to 100 brands in their equivalent of an Albertson’s, Safeway, or Fred Meyer, let alone the number of offerings from a Belmont Station), holding the distributors accountable for picking up the retailer’s empties, storing them in their warehouses, then returning them to the brewery.

And…we brewers aren’t sitting on tons of real estate where we can store smelly, nasty bottles and cases, nor can most of us afford a bottle washer (either for capital investment, labor, or energy/water/chemical inputs). For a production brewery of Deschutes/Full Sail/Widmer's size, you are looking at a multi-million dollar investment for the machinery alone. Think of your local, very small brewer who has a mobile bottler come in once a month or so. She probably only has enough space for the bottles that are there that day (I have worked with women brewers here in the States!) and is happy to see the pallets leave as soon as possible.

Can America Return to Returnable Bottles?

For some reason, breweries love love love to show you their bottle lines.  When I traveled through Europe last year, brewers would often fairly yawn as they gestured to 19th century mash tuns or coolships--but put them in the bottling room, and they got school-girl giddy.  The mystery of why I never solved.  However, to bring this wandering intro to its point--in Belgium, they all used returnable bottles.  Everyone.  Remarkably, they get over 90% return rates, and the bottles survive many, many refillings.  (Look at your next bottle of Orval and see if it isn't worn at the wide spot.) 

I stowed all that in the back of my mind as one of those funny quirks that I would likely never have a chance to write about, until this, from Double Mountain:

About our bottles: in addition to being a great size and shape, our unique half-liter (16.9 oz) bottles are uniquely strong. Extra glass in the mold makes the bottles more durable and thus perfectly suited for reusing, unlike nearly all American glass on the market today. (But it’s otherwise common in Canada, Europe and pretty much every other part of the globe.) It is much, much more energy-efficient to clean and refill a returnable bottle a dozen times than it is to make (and then destroy) a dozen “one-way” bottles. We’re doing it this way because we can.

We encourage you to bring your bottles back to us so that we can put them back into service again. We’ll even pay you an extra five cents on your deposit, just for being good. Our plan is to have retailers in local markets return empties to us to keep them out of the evil glass crushers.

In Belgium, brewing lines have little laser eyes that scan every bottle before it goes into the queue and snatches out damaged or dirty ones, which I mention because, obviously, it's groovy.  I assume Double Mountain's new system has the same tech (though they don't wander into those particular weeds in explaining it.)


In any case, here's the issue.  When I asked them about returnable bottles, Belgians were never convinced it was enormously more green than our system--using a bottle once, grinding it up, melting it back into a bottle, and sending it back out--but I have a hard time seeing how.  Reusing bottles means a fair amount of water use to clean dirty bottles--but so does recycling.  And, in Double Mountain's scheme, most of the returned bottles will come from retailers in the Hood River area--perhaps eventually as far away as Portland.  Still, that's only 60 miles, which means the transportation footprint is quite small.  It seems inconceivable to me that reusing bottles isn't a greener solution than constantly buying new ones.

So let's assume this is right.  Can breweries lead the way back to reusable bottles?  It would be yet one more way in which breweries lead the way in embracing greener operations.

And kudos to Double Mountain. 


Update: In comments, Double Mountain's Matt Swihart confirms my hypothesis:

You are spot on regarding the carbon footprint. At smaller shipping distances, returnable/reusable glass is the most green packaging option (less drinking draft beer out of keg... clearly the best), recycled glass as next in line for short hauls, then when you start talking thousands of miles, cans due to the lighter weight of the package.

Counter-Intuitive Facts About Beer and Water

Earth Day is just a few days away, a date coinciding nicely with an item in the current Harper's Index (May, 2009):

Gallons of freshwater consumed in the production of a gallon of milk and beer, respectively: 1000, 300.

The source was a little obscure, but I tracked it to a Dutch professor of water engineering (a discipline that sounds obscure until you consider how much time the Dutch spend trying to engineer water) who hosts a site called Water Footprint. What's a water footprint? The professor, Arjen Hoekstra, explains:

The water footprint is an indicator of water use that looks at both direct and indirect water use of a consumer or producer. The water footprint... is defined as the total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the goods and services.... Water use is measured in terms of water volumes consumed (evaporated) and/or polluted per unit of time.

He doesn't explain exactly how he calculated the water use for beer, save for mentioning the ingredients, but the result is counterintuitive. Beer is generally described as a water-intensive product. Yet he lists a number of products (apples, bread, cheese, chicken, pork, tea, etc.), and beer is quite low compared to most others, not just milk. For example, it takes about the same amount of water to produce a single apple as a glass of beer (70 liters vs. 75 liters). Other products have their footprints listed in other measures, so it's not so easy to compare (40 liters per slice of bread, 2400 liters per hamburger, 3,900 liters per kilo of chicken meat)--but these are obvious water hogs by comparison.

This is a lesson in measuring total consumption versus final-stage consumption. Breweries consume a lot of water, but when you compare the water consumed by the ingredients used to make beer along with the brewery's use, beer's water footprint is quite low. So drink up--beer is a low-water-use product.

Localvore Movement Goes Beery

Five years ago I read a story in Harper's Magazine that revolutionized the way I thought about food. It was really the vanguard of a now well-documented movement devoted to eating local. In the Harper's piece, Bill McKibben described a diner in Barre, Vermont that tried to buy all its produce locally. At the time, it was a radical idea. There weren't so many local producers--gigantism had wiped out most of the family farms. The remaining local producers already had contracts with huge conglomerates. And thanks to the streamlined national food-production network, there weren't local producers growing the diversity owner Tod Murphy needed.

Since there weren't any Vermont pork producers, Murphy found a 15-year-old kid to do it on his parents' dairy farm. He had to build his own smoker to cure the pork. And so it went. Murphy had to build up a micro network of producers who were willing to disconnect from the national/global food chain and sell directly to him. (If you are a subscriber, you can log on to the Harper's webpage and see the archived article here.)

The virtues were manifold: small farmers could make more money selling to Murphy and could survive as small-scale producers; Murphy got local food that was healthier and tastier than what he could find in the national marketplace; it helped create a sense of community and began to rebuild local connections between producer and retailer; the money stayed in the local marketplace; the carbon footprint required to produce the food dropped substantially; and on and on.

The movement has gained a lot of traction, and now we're seeing breweries get into the action:

A few yards from his brewhouse at Blue Mountain Brewery in Afton, Virginia, Taylor Smack, owner and brewmaster, shows me his little field of dreams. One year ago, on a quarter-acre plot, Smack planted 200 hop vines, climbing plants that produce the flowers that are used to make beer. Today he admits that his yield wasn't quite what he'd hoped for. He didn't water the plants enough, he says, and he used the wrong fertilizer. Standing between thin rows of his plants, Smack reaches up and picks off a bud. "These are kind of pathetic looking compared with a German hops yard, where they grow thick and bushy and 30 feet high. But we're trying," he says. "We don't claim to be farmers."

Eco-conscious foodies already know the "buy local" mantra, and for good reason: reduce the miles a product travels from farm to table and you typically reduce its carbon footprint. But for many, including Smack, buying local is about something more. It's about establishing a sense of place, knowing where your food comes from, and supporting your own community. Smack is trying to apply these principles to his beer. And so despite his obvious shortcomings as a farmer, Smack continues to tend his fields, because he can't get locally grown hops unless he goes out and grows them himself.

Leave aside the fact that he doesn't know how to grow hops (planted a year ago, it's no wonder his yield sucked), this is a great trend. He's trying to do what the Farmer's Diner did:

Toward the end of my visit, Smack walks me out the back door of the brewery to show me the irrigation system he's set up: he's recycling the wastewater from his brewery and using it to water his hop vines.... Smack has a lot of loyal patrons, and he's even opened a restaurant in his brewhouse that will soon feature beef and lamb raised on a nearby farm and fed with Blue Mountain Brewery's leftover barley.

Smack is trying to figure out where to get local barley, but it's just not grown in Virginia. He has a local who is willing to help him grow hops, and maybe he can find someone to grow some barley for him, too. (Gentleman farming is big in the South, right?)

It would be great to see this happen all over the country--or at least where barley and hops can be reasonably grown (counterintuitively, not everything local is green; if farmers have to use too much energy--power for greenhouses, petrol-derived fertilizers, precious water in arid climates--it takes more energy to grow local than to ship from, say, Oregon).

Since I spent yesterday castigating Rogue, let me at least tip my hat to them here. It is the only Oregon brewery I know of that has begun hop and barley cultivation. The motivation may have been financial as much as environmental, but that does nothing to diminish the impact.

The benefits of local production could extend well beyond lowering carbon footprints. The hop market is one of the most streamlined, global markets in agriculture, and small breweries often get crunched by the demands of the giants. Hop growers cater their crops producers like In-Bev, which mainly demand super-high-alpha varieties that maximize the bitter-to-dollar ratio. Why not? You can't taste hops in Bud, anyway.

Perhaps local cultivation would lead growers to develop specialized hops that would thrill craft beer lovers. American brewing is distinguished mainly by our citric hops, but why should it stop there? Local cultivation creates the opportunity for rebuilding those connections between brewer and grower, creating the opportunity for collaboration. What about organic hops--it's a lot easier if you've trying to convince a 10-acre producer. You get the point.

So cheers to Virginia's Blue Mountain, and cheers to Rogue. May you be only the start of a much larger trend.

Full Sail Gets Green "BEST" Award

Further evidence that breweries are at the very vangard of green business. Following the Lucky Lab's new solar array and Hopworks' new green building, Full Sail has announced that the Portland Office of Sustainable Development has awarded it a "BEST" Award. That's the Businesses for an Environmentally Sustainable Tomorrow award, offered to Full Sail for “demonstrating excellence in business practices that promote economic growth and environmental benefits.”

Full Sail's eco-efforts:

Efficient brewhouse: The brewery is as sustainable and efficient as possible, starting with the parts of the building that were reclaimed and recycled when the brewery first opened in the old Diamond Fruit cannery. The company utilizes energy measures such as energy-efficient lighting and air compressors, and compresses the work week into four very productive days, which helps reduce water and energy consumption by 20 percent.

Sustainable brew process: While average breweries consume six to eight gallons of water for every gallon of beer produced, Full Sail has reduced its consumption to a mere 3.45 gallons, and operates its own on-site wastewater treatment facility.

Reduce-Reuse-Recycle: Full Sail uses 100% recycled paperboard on all its packaging (and was one of the first in the industry to commit to long-term purchasing of recycled paper products). Everything from office paper to glass to stretch wrap to wooden pallets is recycled. Even dairy cows are beneficiaries of brewery waste: 4,160 tons of spent grain and 1,248 tons of spent yeast are sent back to farmers every year to use as feed for cows.

Community-wide practices: Full Sail purchases 140 blocks of Pacific Power Blue Sky renewable energy per month. This practice results in the reduction of 168 tons of carbon dioxide emissions, the equivalent of planting 33,000 trees. Full Sail also supports over 300 events and charities each year, with a focus on those in the Hood River area.... Full Sail was a founding member of the Hood River Chamber of Commerce’s Green Smart program, an initiative that helps businesses and organizations within the Hood River watershed increase their productivity and profitability by improving resource efficiency and by reducing waste and pollution.

Congrats to the 47 owners out there in Hood River.

Green Beer

An eagle-eyed observer (my wife) noticed yesterday that something protruded from the roof of the Lucky Lab that looked remarkably like photovoltaic panels. Told me I should check into it. Thanks to the wonders of the internets, I have confirmed her theory:

SOLAR BREWERY(Hawthorne)
It's hard to miss our new solar thermal hot water panels as you approach our pub. We've got 16 four foot by ten foot panels gathering hot water from the sun. Today it's partly cloudy and 43 degrees and we are pulling down over 100 degree water! We can't wait 'til summer! Keep you're eyes posted for a solar powered beer. This is the first commercial brewing application of solar water heat in Oregon and you can drink the results!

No idea how old the posting is, and I find no other reports of it online. Until now. Prost!

Also going green is Deschutes Brewery:

Deschutes Brewery’s latest release in the Bond Street Series, Green Lakes Organic Ale, hit the shelves right around Christmas. “We have always been committed to sustainability and see this new beer as a natural extension of our interest in doing things the best way possible,” said Deschutes Brewery founder Gary Fish....

After working with Oregon Tilth for nearly six months, Deschutes Brewery received organic certification for its 50 barrel brew house. The brew house, built in Oregon by JV Northwest, was the anchor of the brewing facility built in 1993 that expanded the operation outside of the original brewery and public house. After brewing 20,000 batches of beer, it now meets the stringent standards of the National Organic Program.

It's not actually clear to me whether this means the entire brewery is going green, or if the brewery has to be certified even for a single beer to be certified. Either way, Deschutes once again shows its attention to detail. I'll try to track down a bottle of Green Lakes and see how it measures up.