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.

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!

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.

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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