Well, after a lot of set-up work, GreenGrog.com is here for real. We invite you to check out our feature stories, which you can find under “Feature navigation.” They highlight the dance between sustainability and profitability, the way the hops shortage has affected organic brewers, and of course how home brewing can lead to candy and cleanliness.

Happy reading, and as always, let us know what you think!

GOOD Magazine has a great legend of organic brands and the big-time food processors that own them.

Beer isn’t included on the list, but it raises a similar point we’ve been talking about a lot lately, which is that organic products made by big companies (for example, Anheuiser-Busch’s — or, excuse us, Green Valley Brewing Co.’s — Stone Mill Organic Pale Ale organic brew) won’t often be labeled as being owned by the actual parent corporation, because the buyers in the niche market like buying from what they think is a smaller organic company. Read the rest of this entry »

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.