Tons of people have been sending us links to stories about global warming’s effect on beer lately, especially since a New York City Council Member — James Gennaro, out in Flushing, Queens — is kinda trying to wrangle it into a campaign issue.

What it amounts to is people just reporting the weather-induced hops and grain shortages that have been driving up the industry-side costs for over a year now (and which are finally likely to be passed on to consumers in greater amounts). You can check our video on the matter for some background here.

One question we’ve been faced with goes like this:

What kind of beer container is best for the environment?

The answer is: Kegs. They’re reusable. So are the glasses you’re pouring your beer into (or, if you’re having a picnic or something, surely you’re using easily biodegradable plastic cups made from corn, right?).

But when it comes down to bottles vs. cans, there is some disagreement. First, there’s this video from TitanTV sent to us by Civilization of Beer President Samuel Merritt. It would suggest that bottles are better. See, we didn’t see that coming at all.

Skeptical, we poked around the Internet and I Googled one of my favorite environmentally-friendly features, the reliable Ask Umbra column at Grist. Well, Umbra a qualified agreement.

We also dug up another column called Ask Leo at the Guardian Unlimited in the UK.

Leo tackles the beer packaging conundrum by saying that:

As a somewhat crude comparative measure of the energy demands that go into making glass bottles and cans, the Waste and Resources Action Programme (wrap.org.uk) uses the electricity required to power a television. It says that the manufacture of one glass bottle needs the same amount of energy as it takes to power a television set for 20 minutes, whereas an aluminium can needs three hours of the equivalent energy.

We aren’t mathematicians, and this math is certainly faulty. But, that looks like 9 bottles of beer against one can of beer.

We’d happily drink nine bottles for the equivalent environmental impact.

When I first met Kevin Hooshangi, beer sommelier and owner of Village Pourhouse, he asked me if I knew how to drink a beer.

Now, I’ve drunk plenty of beers, but no one has ever asked if I knew how to drink a beer. So I said, “no.”

And it turned out, I really had no idea what drinking a beer actually involved.

So, here’s a video of Hooshangi setting the beer-swilling peasants of the world straight on the path to proper beer drinking.

Tell your friends.

Scary title, right? Maybe just because I’ve been reading about the middle of the 20th century. But don’t worry, these laws are about nationalism! I mean. Wait, that still doesn’t sound good. These laws are about food and nationalism!

The Reinheitsgebot (purity law), which good ol’, reliable Wikipedia tells us is around half a millenia old, was designed to keep robots from taking over the parts of Germany that are made from chocolate and cinnamon. Just kidding. That’s what old people want you to think Wikipedia does. (more…)

OK, so in explaining what we’re reporting on to friends and family, we’re finding that people often ask two questions. One, what does organic mean? Two, what are you, some kind of smartass?

To answer the first question, GreenGrog’s own Kenan Davis visited a farmer’s market at 116th Street and Broadway in New York not too long ago. Here’s what three farmers had to say: