Well, as the new Web site nears completion — sort of — we figured it was time to put out a new map. This map shows breweries within 250 miles of New York City, since we’re here in New York and distribution is arguably the biggest impact on a brew’s carbon footprint. We haven’t included brewpubs or the like, just for simplicity. If we’ve missed a brewery, let us know!

Well, GreenGrog split up for the holidays to tour two breweries — I hit New Belgium Brewing in Fort Collins, Colo. and Kenan went to Pisgah Brewing in Black Mountain, N.C. We’ll incorporate what we learned into neato-keen Web presentations later, but I just want to say that my visit to New Belgium left me pretty blown away by the number of things that breweries can do to be more sustainable, as well as by the impression I got from Bryan Simpson, my tour guide, that a lot of breweries are doing pretty well.

I was minding my own business today, reading an article about sustainable lunar living, and I actually took a second to think, hey, some of this sounds like what New Belgium might do. Or Sierra Nevada. Or maybe a bunch of other breweries.

This blog has been a wonderful learning tool for us, so if you know of breweries out there with impressive sustainable efforts (or, heck, deplorable sustainable efforts), do let us know in the comments. Thanks and happy holidays!

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.

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We’ll be hitting New Belgium’s brewery in December with video camera in hand to get up-close and personal, but in the meantime, the Rocky Mountain News (Denver, Colo.) has a quick-hit profile worth checking out:

But underneath any deliberate silliness is a dead-serious commitment to sustainability. Alternative energy provides nearly 100 percent of the brewery’s energy needs. Since a unanimous employee vote in 1999, New Belgium has purchased more than 6.6 million kilowatt hours of wind energy from a wind farm in Wyoming, providing 85 percent of the energy needed. Most of the other 15 percent comes from burning methane recaptured from the wastewater treatment facility built in 2002. The brewery also is working with a local energy startup to make biodiesel fuel from algae that grows partly from the carbon dioxide byproduct of fermentation.

The story also points out that New Belgium is now the nation’s ninth-largest brewer.

Brooklyn Brewery brewmaster Garrett Oliver had a quick op-ed in yesterday’s NYT about big beer vs. small beer. It begins thusly:

JUST 10 years ago, the proposed merger of SABMiller and Molson Coors into MillerCoors would have worried craft brewers. Back then, “American beer” was thought of as a cheap product with very little beer flavor. But today the United States has by far the most exciting beer culture in the world, and America’s 1,500 craft brewers are undaunted by the prospect of a juggernaut that would have 30 percent of the domestic market. The age of American industrial brewing is over.

Over! Pretty bold, Mr. Oliver. We GreenGroggers oughtta get out there and take the Saturday tour at the brewery soon. We heard they used to have an organic brew. Plus, we heard there’s beer there.