Eco Beer: Brews With Positive Environmental Impact
In the world of wines, a sommelier is the expert in a fancy restaurant diners consult when they want to choose a special wine to complement their meal.
Apparently, in the world of beer, there's a way to make a living being an expert as well. Below are brew experts, or cicerones (beer sommeliers) who share with readers what they have evaluated as the most environmentally friendly brews.
Samuel Merritt is the first certified cicerone in New York City, which makes him 1 of 134 such specialists in the United States. He founded Civilization of Beer, a beer education and consulting company. He picks, Old Walt Smoked Wit Beer from Blind Bat Brewery from Long Island, New York. The owner-brewer, Paul Dlugokencky, reuses spent grain to feed livestock and mulch local farms. He also personally distributes his products in a flex-fuel vehicle. Blind Bat is a nanobrewery, the smallest kind of commercial brewery, producing only about a few hundred barrels per year.
Being an expert in beer is not a male-exclusive field. Christina Perozzi and Hallie Beaune are beer connoisseurs who co-wrote The Naked Pint: An Unadulterated Guide to Craft Beer (Penguin, 2009). These ladies partner with high-profile chefs to host beer-and-food pairing dinners, elevating the bubbly, casual brew into the same social prestige as wine. Los Angeles magazine named Perozzi L.A.'s best beer sommelier.
The ladies recommend Sierra Nevada's Estate Homegrown Ale. Sierra Nevada is a family-owned microbrewery that has placed solar panels on every inch of the brewery's rooftop that can support solar panels. They designed the beer production to divert leftover water to an on-site water treatment facility so that the water can be reused, this minimizes waste.
Rich Tucciarone is brewmaster at Hawaii's Kona Brewing Company, which uses solar power and redesigned its bottles' to weigh 11 percent less. A lighter bottle translates to less fuel used during transportation to retail. This beer company employs a sustainability coordinator, and produces the certified-organic Oceanic Organic Saison. Who ever thought that the beer industry could offer green jobs?
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