Hi Umbra,
Due to, among other things, (organic) beer, I ended up in a rather heated discussion on the environment the other day. I’m wondering if you could help clear up a couple of these more or less classic micro-level questions. Which is more environmentally friendly: lighting a cigarette with a match or a lighter? (And how bad is smoking from an environmental point of view anyway?) After hand wash: paper towel or air dryer? Paper cup of coffee or good old ceramics? Wine or beer?
Kjetil M.
Oslo, Norway
Dearest Kjetil,
Organic beer: so pure it makes drinkers forget about sports and think about the environment. I’ve addressed all but one of these questions before. You can find answers to these and other micro-questions in my FAQ. Yes ceramic cup! Go hand dryer! Smoking is indefensible from an environmental angle, so I don’t see any point in debating over how to light a cigarette. Here’s my heartless anti-smoking rant, and some additional lovely factoids from Treehugger.
Whatever you drink, be smart.
So. The remaining, untouched question is wine versus beer. To be fair to cigarettes, alcohol is also a poisonous drug that will maim and kill if used too often. Laying off the sauce will certainly benefit both your carbon foot and your liver. Ask Umbra: the column devoted to fun things we shouldn’t do!
First, some general thoughts. Of the ways to reduce your wine/beer consumption footprint, the main one is not a big surprise: Don’t drive to drink. Other broad guidelines include: buy local, buy in lighter containers, and buy in bulk. The romantic French habit of buying a local barrel of wine and having it bottled in your basement (do they still do this or is it just in pre-War memoirs?) is a great way to go.
Now, as to whether wine or beer wins. A 2007 study called “Red, White, and Green” considered the production and transport of wine. Although cultivation techniques such as organic vs. conventional do have an impact, the main consideration is that glass bottles are heavy and wine often travels far. Typical greenhouse gas emissions for wine, according to this study, were 2 kg per liter. Consumers can help reduce this by buying wine made near to home, investigating lighter box wines, and of course making their own wine. (Interestingly, there is a side note in the study indicating that your Norwegian alcohol monopoly, Vinmonopolet, buys wine in bulk and bottles it in Norway.)
For wine, the size of the container and the method/distance of transport are the big variables. Various studies of beer, on the other hand—some undertaken by brewers—show that refrigeration in open coolers at stores is a big factor. New Belgium Brewing found that retail storage accounted for over a quarter of the carbon footprint for their amber ale; producing the glass and transporting it to the plant was next. They calculated total carbon emissions at 3.19 kg per six-pack. Sapporo has started labeling beer cans with carbon footprints; their estimate is that a 350 ml can of Black Label beer emits 161 g of carbon. Consumers can help by drinking local brews, shopping for unrefrigerated beer, brewing their own beer, and taking large containers of beer home from the local brewery.
All these numbers are interesting, but fairly inconclusive. This is because the footprints of different kinds of wine and beer vary significantly. In part this is because all Life Cycle Analyses are not identical, but it is also due to the plain old variations in how raw materials are grown, how a product is produced, how it is packaged, how far it had to come to you, etc.
You will notice, I hope, that the emissions for a bottle of wine or a six-pack of beer are quite small compared to the most important factor: how you obtain the beverage. A gallon of gasoline emits 8.8 kg of carbon. For you as a consumer of beer and wine, the biggest factor is likely your own transport to the beer or wine. Coincidentally, it’s not wise to drive under the influence of alcohol. I leave the obvious conclusion up to you.
Skålly,
Umbra
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Comments
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redwing Posted 11:12 pm
17 Feb 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8z5befz6ew
http://www.breworganic.com/
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John former Marine Posted 1:19 am
18 Feb 2009
With a food-grade plastic pail and a few other equipment items, making a batch of delicious, rich homebrew is as easy as baking a cake. You already own most of the equipment you need in your kitchen. Buy the caps and other ingredients in bulk. One 40lb bucket of malt extract (available organic) typically costs $70-$100 and will produce 6 5-gallon batches (about 320 standard 12-oz. beers). Buy a pound of hops for $25-30 in bulk, caps for about $0.02 each, and six packets of yeast at about $1-$3 each. If you're a gardener, you can grow the hops yourself (buy a $4 rhizome and plant it near your house or trellis) and one single hop vine will produce enough to flavor 30 gallons of beer. Yeast can be re-used again and again as long as you maintain cleanliness of your equipment and are careful not to kill it with excessive heat. You can store it in tupperware or jars in your fridge or freezer between brewing batches.
Net result:
320 rich, delicious, full-bodied beers for under $0.40 each. That stuff you're buying at Whole Foods...the organic stout for $10.00+ for a six-pack....you could be making it at home for $3.00.
And much smaller carbon footprint...
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oddtree Posted 4:39 am
18 Feb 2009
5 gals cider (ascorbic acid is OK)
2 lbs dextrose (corn sugar)
1 pkt Montrachet dry yeast
Let ferment at least a month - until most bubbles stop. Requires very little headspace - 5 gal carboy will work.
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themangina Posted 4:53 am
18 Feb 2009
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virgobee Posted 5:07 am
18 Feb 2009
"The two biggest producers of Beaujolais Nouveau are going green by transporting their wine by sea rather than air or packaging the vintage in environmentally friendly bottles.
Boisset, the second-largest maker of Beaujolais Nouveau, is bottling its entire harvest in PET bottles that are "absolutely recyclable," said Patrick Egan, a spokesman for Boisset America.
The green shipment is due to arrive in time for the wine's traditional third Thursday in November release.
Meanwhile, Georges Duboeuf, the largest maker of Beaujolais Nouveau, struck a deal with the French government to allow an early release of his wine so that he could use ships to haul about 75 percent of his 2 million U.S.-bound bottles, instead of the one-third that usually arrives by boat."
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mtvyfan Posted 5:10 am
18 Feb 2009
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tuvita Posted 8:00 pm
18 Feb 2009
Anyway, in my year in California I learnt how to make beer, though I haven't practiced it since I moved back here. It is by far the least impact-beverage you can make, even here in Norway, I'd say. The only thing is - if you want to go out to a pub, they don't allow "bring your own alcohol". In most cases you are then stuck with imported beer, or the horrid tasting Norwegian pilsner from Ringnes. To my palate's great discovery, the San Franciscan ale (the one about the anchor)is being sold at some pubs. Then I thought, ouch, what a mileage distance (and CO2) it has created. So I decided to go for the local "naked island" (translated) beer, for the small sum of 82 nok, approximately 12 USD. The moral is: home brew...
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John former Marine Posted 12:36 am
19 Feb 2009
I also make wine at home, usually from berries that I pick when I find them ripe and in abundance but I've also bought concentrated wine must before. With beer, the ingredients are pretty uniform regardless of the name on the label so you can buy bulk dextrose, bulk dark malt, bulk dry malt extract, etc. and come out with a predictable, uniform product. With wine, it's very different. When you make wine, 99% of how it turns out depends on the quality of the grape juice, which can vary from year to year. It's also quite expensive - probably 2 or 3 times as expensive as making beer if you buy grape concentrate that is decent.
As for the electricity that goes into making beer, total cook time is generally under 2 hours. A typical 8-inch heating element on a standard electric stove uses 2,000 watts on high power. Assuming 8 cents per kilowatt hour, that means that I use between $0.08 and $0.32 of electricity to make a batch of beer...pretty much an insignificant cost addition. Also, the energy used to heat the water and other ingredients isn't lost...it goes into my home. So it probably replaces some of the energy the my furnace would be consuming. Yes, it's electricity that is coming from coal...but I'd be willing to bet that the amount of energy expended to make 60 glass bottles is huge compared to what it takes for me to boil 2 gallons of water on my stove for an hour or two.
But wine is good too.....especially if you make it with highbush cranberries.
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mwildfire Posted 1:34 am
19 Feb 2009
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John former Marine Posted 1:35 am
19 Feb 2009
I found a local orchard (near DC) that sells their lower-quality apples for cheap...$5 a bushel. I bought $20 worth of apples last year, washed them, cut them in half, cut out any really bad spots, and ran them through my juicer. Preparing the apples and juicing them took an evening. I add a small amound of acid blend, sugar, and champagne yeast. Anyways, I ended up with about 160 bottles of cider for about $25 total cost. Everyone always asks for the cider when they come by my house so we've made it an annual fall ritual. It was even better in Vermont...the apples were free everywhere along the sides of roads. And they were tastier apples too, not just high-sugar (but otherwise flavorless) varieties that most orchards grow these days. "Wild" apples are definitely the best for cider.
John
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duiker22 Posted 4:59 am
19 Feb 2009
I'm not advocating we live like munks (they make good cider and beer!) But we could start questioning the behaviors we really really enjoy as the places to reduce our footprint. It's easy enough to cut down activities we are ho-hum about (getting to work, the cup we use for our coffee, the bag we use for groceries, etc), but we never seem to be willing to say, "hey! how 'bout we just stop drinking 6 nights a week? can we give up coffee, chocolate, etc at least most of the time?"
Having been pretty darn poor for a period in my life I had no choice but to make those decisions, and I'll tell you, life was perfectly ok and I made it through unscathed sans regular partaking in drink, coffee, etc....and still managed to have a good time!
I dunno, just a thought.
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duiker22 Posted 5:18 am
19 Feb 2009
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RichardinKRV Posted 10:05 am
19 Feb 2009
I came away VERY impressed.
Check out: http://www.sierranevada.com/environment.html
On September 16, 2007 Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.-one of the innovators of the craft brewing renaissance since its founding in 1980-commissioned the first phase of what will be one of the country's largest private solar installations.
This commissioning comes on the heels of the installation of four 250-kilowatt co-generation fuel cell power units, also one of the largest fuel cell installations in the United States.
Sierra Nevada was one of the first regional breweries to install a vapor condenser to recover waste steam from the kettle boiling step to preheat process water. We utilize plate heat exchangers throughout the brewing process to recover energy where practical.
Sierra Nevada focuses on minimizing our usage of this precious resource and continually audits the process to minimize wasteful practices. We have been able to reduce our water usage to almost half of the historical value typically used by breweries in this country.
Sierra Nevada made the commitment several years ago to treat all of our production wastewater to remove this burden from the local municipality. We installed a European-designed, two-step anaerobic and aerobic treatment plant that reprocesses and purifies all of the water produced from our brewing operations.
The methane generated from the anaerobic digestion of the wastewater is put back into use at the on site fuel cells. The methane is used a fuel source within the cells that produce a great deal of the electricity consumed at the brewery. Additionally, water used for truck washing is collected and purified through our own facility.
They have looked at EVERY aspect of production, even the transportation involved in shipping their ale to me.
http://www.sierranevada.com/environment/trans.html
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PermieWriter Posted 2:18 am
23 Feb 2009
But I must plug Gravensteins as the choice apple for cider. Alas for its brief season and lack of shippability. Plant or graft one today!
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stephieb Posted 1:23 pm
07 Sep 2009
www.banrockstation.com.au/plantatreeThey've committed to planting 10,000 trees in Western Australia. All you have to do is register your purchase online.These guys are a company that have long been committed to supporting / sponsoring the environment in many ways. In australia alone, they sponsor the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, they help restore native wetland vegetation, help improve native fish habitats, among other things. And that's just in Australia. I'd be interested to know about other wine makers doing similar things...
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