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German Brewers Warn Fracking Could Hurt Beer
Taco Cowboy writes "Those of you who like free beer, watch out! The practice of fracking for shale gas may ruin the beer you drink. Under the 'Reinheitsgebot,' or German purity law, brewers have to produce beer using only malt, hops, yeast and water. 'The water has to be pure and more than half [of] Germany's brewers have their own wells which are situated outside areas that could be protected under the government's current planned legislation on fracking,' said a Brauer-Bund spokesman. The Brauer-Bund beer association is worried that fracking for shale gas, which involves pumping water and chemicals at high pressure into the ground, could pollute water used for brewing and break a 500-year-old industry rule on water purity."
"it sounded like such a good idea!" ..
Yes! Let's destroy our clean drinking water in the name of boosting the fossil fuel industry! What a great fucking idea!
That's like saying that it's okay to pollute the atmosphere with some poisonous gas (say, for example, chlorine gas) because we can always use technology to re-purify it.
No. Well...maybe. Actually, yes. It really just depends.
Problem solved then! They can simply amend it again to include the cocktail of chemicals from the fracking.
Except that the cost is probably a large multiple of the win you can get from fracking. So why would this be considered an acceptable solution?
Oh, right, because those who get the profits are not the same as those who have to pay the cost.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
1 site contaminated? really? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_hydraulic_fracturing#Groundwater_contamination
Skimming 3 paragraphs shows 3 sites in the US and I'm sure proper research would turn up a lot more. There is a movie about this (arguably propaganda) called Gasland that I have yet to watch. Considering potable water is a necessary resource, and natural gas is not necessary (although it is important). I am very very wary of the proposition of risking one for another.
I think you misunderstand how fracking works. Fracking works by pumping water into the earth. The water is typically not potable, because potable water is expensive. So there's no amount of "monitoring" that can prevent "leaks" because the whole point of the process is to leak. You leak water into the ground under high pressure, and that releases natural gas which can then be exploited.
The problem with fracking is not so much that it would pollute ground water, although it could well do so, but that it will pollute aquifers.
Also, whenever an industry flack says "however, done right..." I wonder if said flack recalls any time in the history of extractive industries when things were "done right." Extractive industries are at their most profitable when things are not "done right," because doing things right is expensive. As long as the costs of not doing things right can be laid off on someone else, the stockholders would sue the asses off of a company that did things "right," because such a company would not be maximizing shareholder value.
So let us not pretend that things will be done right. Let us assume instead that they will not be done right, and plan for that, because that is what is going to actually happen.
it was called "small beer" not "short beer"
Small, short, I just speak American.
Even modern beer doesn't contain enough alcohol to kill bacteria; the important thing is that to make beer you had to boil it
Interesting. I wondered why the small alcohol content worked (maybe it helped a little?). I also wondered why they didn't just boil water, whether it was ignorance or just a preference for beer instead of water (actually I still don't know). I'm also obviously no brewer, as I didn't know you had to boil water to make beer.
I am a brewer, so what you'd learn is that while the small amount of alcohol helps to stem biological activity, there are two parts to ensure bacteria doesn't contaminate the end product - first, that the product is boiled is the true sanitation, but secondly during primary fermentation the active yeast strains compete with bacteria and win (or else it wouldn't be tasty). The fact that beer uses hops is another aid to the effort. The acids in the hop plant have effects that prevent spoilage, such as antibiotic and bacteriostatic qualities against gram-positive bacteria strains, and it seems to fend of molds as well. This way before refrigeration you could cask the beer in the fall/winter/early spring and then put it into a basement or as the germans did, bunkers by river beds, to drink it throughout the summer. Of course, there are exceptions such as belgian sours that purposely utilize brettanomyces, pediococcus, or lactobacillus to introduce the characteristic tang, but that's a little off topic and an entirely different conversation. -ZX