How Green Is Your Beer?
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 09. 3.07
Ah, Labour Day, where the most work one wants to do is sit on a warm deck and lift a cold beer. But how to choose? Heidi Sopinka of the Globe and Mail tells us:
Hopped up on Pesticides: Farmers are estimated to spray hops 14 times a year with an average of 15 pesticides and fungicides. One of the two primary ingredients in most beers (the other is barley), hops constitute about 5 per cent of beer's total volume and account for at least 50 per cent of the taste. Organic beers should have organic hops.
Is Your Beer Vegan? Many beers are clarified with isinglass, which is not an elven village in Middle Earth but collagen made from the bladders of fish. (it is in wine too) See also Warren on organic beer here.
Sopinka also recommends bottles over cans, paint-on rather than paper labels and of course, support your local micro-brewery to minimize the fossil fuels needed to ship that beer to your fridge. ::Globe and Mail
And be sure to watch the very first TreeHugger video, starring Graham Hill when he was still young and cute, telling us to Save energy, Drink Local.
UPDATE: Vanessa at ::GreenasaThistle coincidentally makes a similar point today.
if you’re going to get blitzed, you might as well do it in as green a fashion as possible — drinking a pint of draught beer from a tap rather than out of a bottle is one way, as is buying wine in a two-litre jug rather than two separate one-litre bottles.
Better than bottles with paint-on labels, try draft. And tip your server to ensure they have a living wage, encouraging street life and locally-owned businesses.
Paint-on labels seems like a bad idea to me, since it would likely increase the difficulty of reusing the bottles.
Ruben - as far as i know the painted on labels are far superior in the recycling sense as there is much less waste material. I know of a few local brewers here that screen print the bottles using biodegradable inks that are removed using a UV treatment during the wash process.
I mind you, here in Ontario Canada, we have a pretty good bottle recycling and exchange program in place. Bottles with custom shapes are sent to the respective brewing companies - its the brewer that is responsible for the wash process of their bottles.
If you want a good organic beer in Toronto, check out the Mill Street Organic. Superior beer.
More responsible journalism would have told us if any fungicidal or pesticide traces were found in the finished beer. Without that information, how is anyone to know if they should be concerned or not?
And more to the point: if imported bottled water is an ecological disaster, imported beer is worse.
Brewing your own beer may not necessarily organic but can considerably reduce the ecological footprint of your beer as the ingredients require much less energy to transport and i have been using the same bottles for close to 20years.
CC
In the U.S., you can slap a USDA organic label on just about any beer, since the water and hops don't count. The only ingredient required to be organic in the USA is barley.
The reason is argued that organic hops are "commercially unavailable." This translates into: too expensive. So, if the "King of Beers" wants to label a beer organic, they only have to produce enough to need more organic hops than available. Were there enough organic hops to go around, it would not be difficult for a large corporation to buy them all up and complain that there aren't enough. It's a big loophole for big-dollar corporations. So, the big guys can do whatever they want, and the smaller guys get the shaft. Sound familiar?
USDA organic label: 95% ingredients must be organic.*
*exceptions include water and hops.
Hops are a pretty tough to grow because of aphids, but there are organic hops available for home brewers. Alas, they probably use organic pesticides.
more responsible journalism would have told us if there were trace amounts in our beers? probably not... they have laws regarding these things. I think the main thing people on sites like this are concerned about isn't if they get a little pesticide in their beers... the accumulative environmental affect is much more worrisome.
also, i was talking to a girl who worked at mill street, and she was telling me that her friend's house is covered in hops and it wont stop growing. apparently the stuff grows like wildfire, and if you don't constantly cut it back, it would cover your entire house. sounds to me like something's wrong here. if there're people with houses covered in organic hops, FIGHTING to cut it back, i think we could grow some for real organic beer... just a thought...