Sustainable Brewing, Pt. 1
‘Hoy,
Every time I brew my tiny batches of beer, I’m always struck by the amount of water it takes to make my 5 quarts. Filling the sous vide heater takes two gallons alone, and I usually dump all of that. Beyond that, there’s water used in cleaning all of my gear and making sanitizing solution, plus, you know, the water that actually becomes the beer, and it adds up fast. A commercial brewery, which is almost certainly more efficient than me, still has to burn three to seven gallons of water per gallon of beer, and that’s...kind of a lot.
And while thinking about this inefficiency gave me the idea to write a single (ha!) blog post on sustainable brewing, it turns out the story is absolutely massive, covering such disparate topics as upcycling spent grain, seeking out alternative power sources for power-hungry breweries, and even the pursuit of perennial barley strains in order to boost crop efficiency. Not only can every element of brewing be upgraded as the climate changes, but every single element should be upgraded, in some cases radically.
So, as you might guess, what was originally going to be a single post is now what I’m sure will be the largest series of posts I’ll have written thus far, and so I thank those of you willing to buckle up and stare into the abyss that is industry-wide, climate-driven transformation.
Climate Change in Brief
The vicissitudes of weather brought on by climate change have grown in amplitude to point that they’re now quite visible, whether in the burning forests and plains of California and Australia, the vanishing shorelines of populated islands swallowed whole by the rising ocean, or the stunningly complete destruction of Texas’s entire power infrastructure. And it seems that, at last, public opinion is starting to shift. While Democrats have largely been on board with, if not acting upon, then at least acknowledging the reality and seriousness of climate change since some time around An Inconvenient Truth spurred national debate, it seems that as a generation of young Americans, for whom Katrina was an early childhood memory, enter the voting public, even the Republican party faces a coming generational reckoning.
Just as with all permanent political sea changes, this shift in opinion is sure to bring about to waves of changes: first, the “vote with your dollar” effect will push companies to adopt, or at least appear to adopt, climate-friendly practices, lest they lose customers to competitors. This can be seen, for example, in the staggering growth of electric vehicles on the road in the US. Is this a response to tax incentives and grants? To some degree, sure, but such growth would be impossible without strong public support for the idea of electric cars, since the NYT, for example, just made the case last month for the economy of such vehicles. A recent study, for example, found that craft beer drinkers were willing to pay a premium for sustainably-brewed beer ($1.30 per 6-pack, or 14% more).
If climate change were to stop in its tracks, that might be the end of the story, but as we are all continuously told, climate change isn’t going anywhere. Large parts of LA and NYC will be underwater by 2050, for example, barring Blade Runner-style sea walls, with some proposed (and probably inadequate) plans figuring in the billions for single cities. Worse yet, there’s basically no time left to waste if we want to keep warming to 1˚C, and given the current global political climate, I just don’t see that happening, meaning we’re likely to see significant, painful global warming.
Which is to say, that the shift in the brewing industry (and indeed, for basically all industries) won’t stop at free market forces, but will eventually manifest in legislative action. Practically, this means that what might start out as a shift from (super, super wasteful) Hazy IPAs to things like stale bread-laced Saisons or low-ABV Pub Ales, may eventually grow into world war-style limits on grain and hop purchases and ABV limits, possibly even limits on annual barrelage (beer volume).
Working within these limits will be of paramount importance in the coming decades for craft breweries and home brewers alike, particularly as the latter are incubators for the former. And there is good news: as we’ll explore in this series, there is virtually no element of the brewing process that can’t be made more efficient, from power use, to water use and disposal, malt growing, malting, and disposal, mash efficiency, and even packaging yield. And while these changes may spell the death of the (modern) IPA and probably any beer over 5%, say, they hardly spell the end of the insane variety of modern craft beer, just the end of wasteful brewing.
Cheers,
Adrian “Green New Deal” Febre