Ever since Al Gore scared the shit out of us with his "Inconvenient Truth", most people have started to pay attention to the little catch phrase, “environmental sustainability”. Regardless of where you stand on global warming issue, you will most likely be impressed with a movement within the craft beer industry - and now starting to affect the greater brewing industry – regarding eco-friendly beer production. So even if you want to drive a Hummer, you can offset your carbon footprint by simply drinking more beer from the following brands. If this logic seems dubious, then drink more. Below is a list of the seven most environmentally progressive breweries in the US of A.

1. Brooklyn Brewery

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In the heart of Brewers Row in Brooklyn, New York sits the cleverly-named Brooklyn Brewery, which is 100-percent wind-powered. Impressively, this brewery is the first business in New York City to be entirely wind powered – 2003.  Brooklyn’s yearly production is at about 1.6 million gallons of beer, and the switch to wind power is estimated to save 335,000 lbs of carbon dioxide from going into the atmosphere each year. Not bad for a smaller brewery in the largest urban concentration in North America.

2. New Belgium Brewing Company

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The Fort Collins, CO-based New Belgium Brewing Company, is about 70% wind powered. Additionally, the brewery reclaims their wastewater, cultivate its bacteria, and combust the methane as another power source for the plant – this results in the remaining 30% of the plant’s sustainable energy. The Brewery also cleans and re-filters the water during the cooling process of brewing, and then gives the water back to the city for use by its residents.

3. Coors Brewing Company

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Coors, one of the largest brewer’s in the world often receives attention for their being the fist to develop recyclable aluminum beer cans. Nowadays, Coors is on the forefront of companies that have sold ethanol - which is a by-product of breweries - to refineries, which in turn resell it to green gas stations, or those that cater at least to drive eco-friendly cars. While many may perceive this as opportunist by Coors, it should be noted that they are a very successful business that has reduced ethanol distribution to the surrounding area on a level unparalleled by its competitors. Suffice to say, not all of the major breweries are as friendly to the environment.


4. Stone Brewing Company

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Stone Brewery has recently made an effort to become more environmentally friendly, and have covered most of the brewery with solar panels. This has resulted in not only cutting their energy bills in half, but the 1500 solar panels attached to the outside of their facility are responsible for offsetting an estimated 538000 lbs of carbon emissions (lifespan). According to Stone, this is the equivalent of plating 204 acres of trees. Stone also has a fleet of bio-diesel delivery trucks, which it uses to distribute Stone and other beer brands products around the west coast. 

5. Odell Brewing Company

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Odell’s environmental goal is to actively reduce green gas by waste reduction, recycling, and the employment of renewable and sustainable energy sources. Skylights line the ceilings of the brewery and the company encourages its employees to bike to work and carpool. For its energy needs, the brewery is 100% wind-powered, which dramatically reduces co2 emissions.  Additionally, the brewery’s delivery trucks all run on bio-diesel, which is biodegradable and results in 78% less co2 emissions than conditional fuel usage.

6. Sierra Nevada Brewing Company

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Sierra Nevada is not only the second largest craft brewery in the nation, but also a vanguard in the environmentally friendly brewery movement. The brewery is on its way to becoming 100% solar-powered, and its system of solar grids are able to produce 1.4MW of power for the brewery. Sierra Nevada executives also hope to institute a system in which their surplus energy will be somehow be made available to the neighboring businesses which rely on California’s perennially-overloaded power grid. Sierra Nevada has also signed on to the California Climate Action Registry, a consortium of green businesses working together to track, report and reduce greenhouse emissions statewide.

7. Great Lakes Brewing Company

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Great Lakes Brewery is an environmentally progressive brewery with a mission statement to “Take, Make and Remake”.  Recently the company has instituted a “Zero Waste Initiative”, aimed at making full use of the by-products generated form the brewing process. Great Lake management aims to perfect their environmentally sustainable production model to the point where in 100% of the resources are used in a closed loop. In addition to their delivery trucks running on vegetable oil, the company has a number of other gardens including: recycling grains from the brewing process to be used for baked goods, planting urban gardens, recycling (all packaging is recyclable too), vermi-composting and the use of natural lights an alternative to traditional energy use.

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