How Hombrewers Achieve Sustainability

By Dave Burdick and Kenan Davis

During the process of brewing beer, yeast settles on the bottom of the fermentation tank after converting sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Then it usually gets thrown out.

But Charlie Walker takes the spent yeast and makes candy.

Walker, 58, is a lawyer by profession but by avocation he’s a homebrewer who finds creative ways to reduce and reuse. In some ways, sustainability is easier for the homebrewer than for Big Beer.

“Rather than waste all that good yeast, which is very healthy, I pour it into a pot. I add sugar, and I heat it,” Walker said. Then he adds some corn syrup, cuts the sugary mass into small chunks, and rolls them into balls. After coating them in dry malt so they don’t get sticky, he wraps them in wax paper, ready to share with friends.

He’s been a member of the New York City Homebrewers Guild since 1992 and sometimes brings his homemade beer candy to monthly meetings at the Burp Castle in the East Village.

According to Chris O’Brien, beer writer and author of Fermenting Revolution, “The easiest measure of sustainability is to drink locally.” And there’s nothing more local than the home. Often the motivation for brewing at home is simply to make good beer, but the do-it-yourself model also cuts out a lot of the transportation and energy costs that come with professionally made beer.

Besides making taffy-like beer candy, Walker also grows his own hops and reuses old, heavy Budweiser bottles for bottling the finished product – usually brown ale.

The hands-on experience of homebrewing can lead to some creative ways of reusing products, especially homebrewers with the space to brew outdoors.

Outdoor homebrewers are generally very good at capturing water used for chilling the wort (a sweet liquid boiled to make beer) and reusing it to wash the car or water the lawn, said Paul Gatza, director of the Brewers Association. Gatza even found a creative way to brew beer and get clean at the same time. “I used to brew on a deck and would hop underneath to take a shower in my chiller water to get the most out of the water,” he said.

Even though certain parts of brewing can be made more efficient at a large brewing facility, such as conservation of water and energy, homebrewing can be very sustainable, said Amelia Slayton, co-founder of Seven Bridges Cooperative, an organic ingredients supply business.

Homebrewers are champions at reusing their ingredients and equipment.

Slayton says homebrewers are reducing the demand for manufactured products by reusing bottles. And some brewers even use their spent grain to make granola bread.