|
|
PHOTOGRAPH BY TOM WELLER, PICTURE ALLIANCE/GETTY IMAGES
|
|
By Laura Parker, Senior Reporter, ENVIRONMENT
From start to finish, brewing beer is environmentally unfriendly. A single eight-ounce glass of beer takes about 20 gallons of water to produce. The brewing process requires large amounts of electricity—to heat hot water and steam and then for refrigeration.
Then there’s glass and aluminum for containers and plastic and cardboard for packaging.
But don’t despair.
Before you give up your Friday night brewski, take a look at writer Jess Craig’s report on how the beer industry is trying out new solutions to make production more sustainable. One method takes aim at transportation costs of trucking containers of product that is 95 percent water. Could beer be dehydrated, transported, and then rehydrated at its destination? Patrick Tatera, a chemical engineer, asked that very question—and then went on to found Sustainable Beverage Technologies, which is testing out BrewVo, a highly concentrated beer that is one-sixth the weight of a regular beer.
Another experiment, begun in 2013, replaces hops, which gives beer its aroma and distinctive flavor, with Berkeley Yeast, a genetically engineered yeast. Growing hops, the flower on a perennial vine, consumes oodles of water. Growing one pound of hops requires 300 to 450 gallons of water, depending on local conditions.
So when Charles Denby, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleague Rachel Li, an engineer, invented a strain of brewer’s yeast that tastes more like hops than actual hops it showed great environmental potential. Because hops has been so central to beer-making for centuries, Denby’s newfangled yeast was slow to catch on. As climate change closes in and water becomes scarce, Berkeley Yeast sells now to hundreds of breweries.
These innovations are among efforts by the larger food and beverage industry to reduce their carbon footprint, which the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine says is one of the most unsustainable industries in the world.
Would you give dehydrated beer or suds reengineered with newfangled yeast a try? Let us know!
If you want to get this email each week, join us here and invite a friend.
|
|
|
|
