Boozin’ Blog

No, this isn’t another post about making your beer green. One was enough. This one’s about environmentally friendly beer.

Yesterday Anheuser-Busch issued a press release promising that by the end of 2009 they plan to have 1 in 7 of their beers brewed entirely using renewable fuel.

In case you didn’t know, brewing beer uses a lot of energy and water. It takes a lot of energy to boil then cool beer during brewing. And it takes a lot of water and energy to clean up after and get ready for the next brew. I read somewhere that it takes around seven gallons of water per one gallon of beer produced using traditional methods. With a lot of effort the greener brewers have been able to get that down to three to one. So any progress that A-B can make in this direction is a positive thing.

But is it enough? Can they go further? Probably not in the economic climate but one would like to see something better that one-seventh of the beer brewed using green standards. And what about all of the big Budweiser trucks we see on the highway? I’m willing to wager that they are burning fossil fuels.

There are beers brewed much more conscientiously. New Belgium is a well known example. Using a combination of innovative brewing techniques, wind power and a system like BERS mentioned in the A-B press release NB managed to go off the grid completely a few years ago. Of course NB isn’t the only brewer looking for new and more responsible ways to make beer but these are all relatively young companies and brew only a fraction of a percent of the beer that A-B makes.

So, on the whole, this is indeed good news from the big brewer.

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Something needs to be done. There’s a real problem looming on the horizon and I’m not sure that we have done enough to properly prepare ourselves for it.

Al Gore and environmental activists have finally, after years of persistence, convinced the world that global climate change is an issue that must be dealt with. As a result more hybrid cars are being sold than ever before, alternative energy sources like wind and solar are gaining more and more prominence. And alternative fuel sources to oil are being produced in greater quantities than ever before.

That’s what’s causing the problem. Corn is a popular choice as a bio-fuel alternative to oil. But there are only so many farmers in the world and they haven’t been sitting idle all of these years just waiting for a bio-fuel revolution. They’ve been growing other crops but with demand for corn rising and driving up the cost, it’s hard for these farmers to say no. And when they say yes to corn, they have to say goodbye to whatever it was that they were growing before.

Do you see where I’m going with this? Farmers that used to grow crops that are turned into our favorite booze are being replaced. Barley, grown for beer, and agave, grown for tequila, are both falling to king corn. As a result beer is becoming more expensive and that trend is expected to continue in the future. Tequila will also grow more expensive and, worse, become harder to find. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before we see the same trend begin to affect Scotch, vodka, Irish whisky, bourbon, rum, etc.

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