BeerMenus.com provides the delightful service of letting you know where, in New York City, you can find certain beers.

How does this fit in with GreenGrog? Well, draught beers have a lighter carbon footprint than beers in bottles or cans, so if you’re looking for, say, an Ommegang Witte, you can search BeerMenus.com and find at least four locations where it’s available on draft (and cheaper, actually, than several where it’s only in bottles).

[via Gothamist!]

Beer-bots!! Ale droids! Call them what you want, but we love robots and beer.

And it turns out that Asahi made a limited number of refrigerator robots a couple years ago. They can cool a six pack and then pop open and pour a beer at the press of a button.

Is this sustainable? We don’t know. We just can’t believe we’ve never come across this before.

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.

Westvleteren beer is ranked the best beer in the world by Rate Beer and Beer Advocate, but it’s limited in quantity and difficult to find.

A recent Wall Street Journal article, “Trappist Command: Thou Shalt Not Buy Too Much of Our Beer,” described how the monks at St. Sixtus monastery are fighting to stave off an unquenchable demand.

The monks are doing their best to resist getting bigger. They don’t advertise and don’t put labels on their bottles. They haven’t increased production since 1946. They sell only from their front gate. You have to make an appointment and there’s a limit: two, 24-bottle cases a month. Because scarcity has created a high-priced gray market online, the monks search the net for resellers and try to get them to stop.

(more…)

…because they’re not cars. They’re hybrids between wine and beer.

Yeah, pretty much the only thing “green” about these beverages is that, uh, the word hybrid means something else in a different context. Still, pretty interesting.

“Chardonnay Blonde is not a malternative, but rather a true wine/beer hybrid,” says Keith Villa, Blue Moon’s brew master. He starts with a wheat beer base, then adds juices from chardonnay and sauvignon blanc grapes; it’s then given time to ferment. “At the end of the process the product looks kind of like beer, but smells and tastes like a white wine spritzer.

Anyway, Blue Moon (a Coors subsidiary — er, MillerCoors, I guess) has its environmental priorities, so I guess that’s how I’ll justify making this post. But I have no excuse for the delightfully misleading headline. Um. Especially since making those brews takes lots of gas. So. Yeah.