Low Impact

I’ve finally found a uniquely Aussie way to save the environment…brewing your own beer!

(Bear with me on this one - I do have a point….somehow!)

After being pleasantly surprised by a friend’s homebrew beer, I started to think about giving it a go myself. And as I thought about it, it occurred to me that brewing your own beer can be beneficial to the environment. No, seriously!

As with so many things, a lot of it comes down to transportation. If I were to go down to the shops and buy a case of beer, its easy to forget that those bottles of beer started life around 700km away in Victoria. A case of beer (24 bottles, holding 9 litres in total) weighs around 10 kg, which has to be transported by truck all the way to my local shops. Obviously, that truck needs to burn diesel to get here, which in turn emits the greenhouse gas CO2. And the more beer that gets shipped here, the more diesel that truck needs to burn to get here…or indeed, the more individual trucks need to be sent.

By contrast, if you are doing simple homebrew with a concentrate, you need a 1 kg tin of concentrate, which will produce 23 litres of beer. The big difference is that you supply your own water - it doesn’t need to be (in effect) shipped up from Victoria.

So homebrew requires a truck to carry 1 kg of weight for 700km to provide 23 litres of beer here in Canberra compared to carrying around 25 kg for the same amount of pre-bottled beer. That’s a huge saving in weight…and therefore a saving in transportation emissions.

There are other advantages too - when brewing your own beer, you typically wash and reuse your own bottles. By contrast, most drinkers throw out the empty bottles of pre-brewed beers, or at best throw them in the recycle bin (which still incurs an energy cost in reprocessing the glass).

I don’t want to analyse this too far, before someone figures out that I could reduce my environmental impact even further by drinking water rather than beer! Also, it has to be said that a more complex homebrew setup (with fermenter heaters, CO2 cylinders and the like) will obviously have a higher environmental cost. Still, its an good example of how the Do-It-Yourself mentality can often result in environmental savings.

But enough talk! Cheers everyone!

Categories: DIY, environment, green, transport

Tags: DIY, self-sufficiency, transport