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Green Geek Beer
DigiDave writes "A time honored tradition on St Patty's Day is to drink green beer. But some breweries go out of their way to make sure that the brewskies we drink are always green, by using environmentally friendly brewing methods. The makers of Fat Tire, for example, use a cogeneration process that involves anaerobic bacteria turning wastewater into methane gas for power."
Patty is a girls name
Its spelled St. Paddy's Day if you're gonna abbreviate it.
Patty is short for Patricia.
Paddy is short for Patrick because the gaelic name is Padraig.
Why does everyone insist on calling St. Patrick a woman?
Anheuser-Busch does the same thing with it's BERS program. Takes all its wastewater and manages microbiological reactions in it to produce mostly clean water and CO2 (for bottling) and Methane to power the boilers. In fact they produce almost all of their own power in several breweries. This isn't anything new.
SOUTHERN MIDWEST???
I beg your pardon, sir, but the noble brew of which you speak is lovingly manufactured in Fort Collins, Colorado, roughly 30 minutes south of the Wyoming border.
http://www.newbelgium.com/
If you're ever in the area, I heartily recommend their free brewery tour. You learn a lot about beer, and at the end you are given a little glass of each of their brews in a fun and chatty atmosphere. It's a great free day date in Fort Collins. Afterwards, you can head back the road into Old Town for great food and a plethora of great bars, all within picturesque walking distance.
I recommend The Crown Pub (on College) and the Rio Grande (on Mountain) for food/drinks, and Elliot's martini bar (on Linden) for drinks. Finish your drunken evening off at Walrus ice cream (on Mountain, next to the Rio), enjoying their homemade deliciousness.
Oh, and personally, I prefer New Belgium's Sunshine Wheat to Fat Tire, mostly because hoppy beers like Fat Tire give me terrible acid reflux, although they are tasty.
Come on, everyone! Let's enjoy Fort Collins!
This message NOT paid for by the Fort Collins tourism board or chamber of commerce. My Japanese-language historical walking tours of Old Town have also ended, due to the fact that I don't live there anymore.
Anyone who doesn't drink Guiness on St Guiness' day has only thems elves to blame.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
And cheap beer isn't good. Ahh, brewing, water and energy -- enough to spark an old geologist's interest; I homebrew from grain and got up early to knock out an ESB.
Brooklyn and New Belgium are both good breweries in that they use REAL grains (mostly malted barley) instead of the cheap and tasteless adjuncts (rice, corn) that make up 50% of cheap American swill. That alone is worthy of support.
But seeing them spend more money to be environmentally friendly is truly impressive. It takes a lot of enery to brew -- the grain must soak in 150F water (the mash), then be rinsed with 170F water to wash out the maltose (the lauter) and finally that resultant wort boiled for 60 - 120 minutes. That ain't cheap. Geting rid of the spent grains through farms is not unusual for small breweries -- but it is cheaper than landfill disposal costs. The wastewater treatment is not cheap either, because brewing produces a lot of it -- rich in yeast and sanitizing chemicals. However, most brewers just drop it into the sewer system.
It's not only admirable, but impressive that these breweries can keep costs in line while going the extra mile in energy and water treatment.
I get a kick out of St. Patty's day when laymen refer to green beer in the most literal sense.
In a lager brewing process the post-fermented wort is sometimes referred to as "green beer", which is the beer before a secondary fermentation process commences (conditioning, lagering, etc.)
As a side note it would be interesting to know how many tech-geeks extend their geektitude into the realm of brewing or zymurgy?
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.