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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."
St. Paddy's was yesterday.
St Patty?
Maybe someone is still struggling after a few too many beers?
I'm not sure I would call this a time honoured tradition either - I'd never even heard of green beer until I went to the US. I'd never seen it either in Ireland or any of the Irish (and I mean real Irish pubs in Kilburn owned by Irish landlords full of first generation Irish people or Irish people working temporarily in London) pubs in the UK I've been to on St Patricks day.
Each of us should be taking local actions to do our part for the planet. For example, I've been using my own anaerobic process to turn beer into methane gas for many years now.
Fat Tire is pretty good. It's not recommended if you ever plan to go back to Bud. Some people don't like a sweet beer, but then some people don't like chocolate either. Ignore those mutants and grab a nice mug if you're in the southern Midwest sometime.
"use a cogeneration process that involves anaerobic bacteria turning wastewater"
... nothing new here:-)
in (state side) domestic beer.
move on
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
If you are in Boston at this time of year DO NOT respond when people introduce themselves as "Irish-American" with "Nice to meet you, I'm a Saxon-Norman-Viking-Dutch-Englishman". Breaking them out of their fantasy world may result in you spending the night in the gutter looking for your teeth instead of getting personally aquainted with a drunk BU chick who can't tell the difference between a Home Counties and Irish Counties accent.
Beep beep.
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?
Seriously, if you tried giving anyone beer than had been dyed green in Ireland, you'd be introduced to that other tradtitional Irish custom of having your head smashed against the bar.
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.
I agree with you, but just so you know: :)
"Patty is short for Patricia. Paddy is short for Patrick"
is not the most intuitive statement in the world
I assumed something like Wasabi Ale.....
#Miyamori Wasabi Beer at
Most people associate beer with cheap piss, generally only drinking it as a social lubricant and really ignoring the true flavours of the beer. That's true for just about any mass-produced beer (VB, Fosters, Bud, Miller, Heineken).
Go out and trying a real beer for once, and not just Guinness on St Pats (arguably not that great a beer). Some of the world's greatest beers are quite accessible and will blow your socks off with their complexity and flavour.
Similar to wine coinnoseurs, there are also those who are (mostly self-professed) experts in beer, preferring something good like a trappist beer with their meal to wine, and deservingly so. A properly brewed beer's a lot more interesting to have with a meal than wine, and there's infinitely more variety.
Heineken is not a good beer. Really. In Holland it's considered mediocre. If you see a beer everywhere, then it's mosty likely crap. Stella's pissy too. Budvar, Pilsener Urquell, Hertog Jan...they're ok for lagers.
A coding session's a heck of a lot more enjoyable when combined with a decent brew. But be careful, too good a beer will distract! Some of my best output's come after having a good Belgian.
Seriously. Go down to your nearest large speciality bottle shop/liquor store and find a few bottles of the higher rated beers that you can find. Drink them, out of the proper glassware and at the right temperature then you'll never go back to a macro again. It could get more expensive, but damn it's worth it. A hint - drink light-coloured beers in warmer weather and darker ones in cool weather.
And then you can have good beer all the time.
Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
Anyone who doesn't drink Guiness on St Guiness' day has only thems elves to blame.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I was in Seattle a while ago, and was advised by all the locals to try the beers from the micro-breweries (after trying Bud-Light i was weary of beers from the other side of the Atlantic).
After trying a few brands (some OK, some not so OK), i tried Fat Tire, and it was the best beer i've had in a long time.
(Coming from Yourshire in England, I'm usually a bit weary when it comes to sampling beers not brewed within 50 miles of where I was born...)
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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.
It is quite easy to say that you only use type X of a commodity - whether it's wind power for your electricity, non-(country of choice) oil for your gasoline, or lottery money for your state's education budget. It doesn't change the fact that everyone ELSE out there doesn't care what your source is - in the aggregate, the total amount of stuff is essentially not affected by you.
Short version: just because Bklyn Brewery uses "only wind power" doesn't mean they've affected total fossil fuel consumption a whit, because any deficit between (total wind power produced) and (total power needed) will be made up by fossil or nuclear, whether the BB chooses to pay extra or not. IOW, Con Ed has chosen to use wind for a certain amount of generating capacity. Since it's very cheap energy when it's flowing, they'd be foolish not to use it anyway to lower the amount of fossil or nuclear they need to use. All this amounts to is having consumers subsidize Con Ed's bottom line. Fine if you want to do it, but don't think it's doing the world some great favor. (The wastewater item is completely different. That is a meaningful Green idea, because it uses locally made, locally available resources to extract something valuable and reduce pollution at the same time.)
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.
First off the malting barley is probably not organic. Even if it is organic, it is farmed with tractors driven by petrol. I have yet to see a commercial farm tractor or combine for that matter driven by a non-oil fuel source. However - it is possible in spite of the bad energy economics cited by Dr. David Pimethal which is still being quoted.
Having been harvested, the grain is hauled by petrol fueled trucks to elevators and then hauled by petrol fueled rail to the maltsters.
The malting plant is probably not green - however it again probably could do better.
Now - as others have pointed out - energy is fungible. In order to be off petrol they would have to work only when the wind blows. Or they would have to harness the exothermic reaction called brewing.
The reason the brewing process gives off CO2 is because a hydrocarbon - eg sugar - is being partially oxidized by the yeast.
Essentually we are going from a polymer based on (CH2O)n into an alcohol which is CH3CH2OH or C(n)H(2n+1)OH where n=2 for ethanol (C2H6O which is really C2H5OH just written differently).
To be more specific we have a series of reactions by alpha and beta amylase which are created during the malting process which is exothermic. During mashing which is also exothermic the starches are broken down into simpler sugars, principally maltose which is a disaccharide made from two glucose molecuals.
So very specifically we have C12H22O11 + H2O -> 2 C6H12O6 followed by
C6H12O6 -> 2 C2H6O + 2CO2 + heat.
The point I am making is that with all these exothermic reactions they are still consuming a great deal of energy so they are not nearly as green as they might like to be seen as.
Next - of the wastewater.
Well - most of this would contain either nothing of much value or yeast which is very high in protein being a fungus and all... fungus are more closely related to animals than to plants. They are an excellent form of nutrition.
Rather than flushing the yeast down the sewer or putting it into holding tanks where it can be degraded by another micro-organism producing methane - it makes more sense to collect it and ship it off for food.
Of course the spent brewer's grains are typically shipped off for cattle fodder since they are high in proteins. Another use for them is as a nitrogen suppliment in synthetic substrates for mushroom production.
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The thing about organics is that plants are basically a polymer of simple sugars. These are built into complex sugars then into starches, cellulose, pentosans and lignin. Fungus digest these. There are many fungus which can do this and some examples are Pleurotis spp, Lentinula spp, Flamulina spp, and I'll not go on. From these three genus we have the common Oyster mushrooms, Shiitaki and Enoki.
Other fungus which are cellulose digesters include Trichoderma spp. T. reesei is used to produce stone washed blue jeans for instance because it is easy to culture and partially digests the cotton. So they are really fungus washed blue jeans not stone washed and here we have another example of people lying to us!!!
There are some who are attempting with some success to use T. reesei to digest wood and produce alcohols. I suspect T. Reesei is being used because it is available and not because it is particularly good at this job.
The economics of this process are actually quite simple.
We start with a polymer made of (CH2O)n
We transform it via enzymes excreted by fungi into C(n)H(2n+1)OH
If we note that the alkane series is C(n)H(2n+2) where for n=8 we get octane then what we see is that our alcohols are simply a slightly oxydized alkane.
The reaction from sugar to ethanol for instance is:
(CH2O)6 -> 2(C2H5OH) + 2CO2
From a molecular weight standpoint we have:
(12+2+16)*6 -> 2*(24+5+16+1) + 2*(12+32)
30*6 -> 2*46 + 2*44
180 -> 92 + 88
Now agricultural products have some moisture even if they are "dry"
Brewskie is a term (infrequently) used by American college students. It is seen primarily in the pot-smoking, permanently drunk sub-genus of this group, and was popularized by our greatest idiot, Pauly Shore.
It means, roughly, "Me idiot. Want beer."
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio