Hands up, all who enjoy a good beer from time to time! But what about the energy consumed making and transporting all of those glass bottles and (for the rest of us—who are we kidding?) aluminum cans? Mining the aluminum used for cans is an even more environmentally-dubious endeavor. Sure, everyone who’s anyone recycles. But you can do one better than recycling your beer bottles and cans: reduce the bottles you need and reuse the bottles you have by taking up the merry art of home brewing.

Making beer is not very different than making bread - except bread goggles can get you in a lot less trouble! You’ll need a little yeast and a lot of patience, as well as the proper cooking gadgets. You can find ingredients, gadgets, and recipes for your favorite beers online or at your neighborhood brew shop.

Now here’s where your environmental prowess comes into play. Instead of recycling or (don’t even think about it) tossing away your bottle after you finish your beer, save the bottle in a cupboard or under your sink. When you have about 70 (12-ounce/135-mL) bottles stashed away, you can begin the beer-making process. Once you begin making your own beer, you will never have to buy another new bottle or can again. Instead of beer bottles, you can also use wine bottles, but you’ll want to let beer in these bottles ferment a little bit longer.

Now it should also be mentioned that there are a number of fantastic and high-minded breweries out there. So, you might like to consider buying these 70 bottles (about 12 six-packs) and the beer they contain from companies like Anderson Valley Brewing Company, a large-scale solar powered brewery, or the New Belgium Brewing Company, which has wonderful sustainability and philanthropy programs, and also just introduced its Mothership Organic Wit beer. You probably have other favorite local and organic beers as well.

All in all, the gear that you will need to start brewing is not extensive: a bucket, a 20-quart (19 Liter) cooking pot, a thermometer, a large sealed container, and a few other odds and ends. The cooking pot is probably the most expensive item. Unless you improvise with material that you already have, the cost of the equipment should come to between $80 and $135. You can also generally find this equipment on Craigslist and Freecycle. If you are able to use a bucket or a thermometer that you already have, just make sure that it has been very well cleaned before you begin. I told a brewer once that I’d heard that 70% of good beer making depended on cleanliness and he responded, “Only 70%?”

The best way to brew your first batch of beer is with a kit—not one of the “beer-in-a-can” packages—but simply a collection of pre-measured ingredients for a particular type of beer. You can get one of these at your local brew shop, or at an online site like homebrewers.com. Once you get the feel of things, you can purchase beer-making ingredients from organic retailers, like breworganic.com. If you’re lucky, you may even live near an organic brew shop, co-op, or grocery store that sells bulk organic brewing ingredients. I also recommend the free “home brew class” offered at breworganics.com.

So cheers, prost, cin-cin, skål, kanpai, and salud! Here’s to drinking environmentally responsibly.

References and Resources:

If you are interested in more on this topic, you may also enjoy the following articles written by my fellow Green Options bloggers.

Green Brews: An Ecology of Beer, by Robin Schidlowski

Organic Beer, Now Without That Pesky Organic Part, by Alicia Erickson

Green Brews: Judging Beer at the Corvallis Brewfest, by Clayton Bodie Cornell

Anheuser-Busch Walks The Organic Trail With New Beer, by Michael dEstries

Tip o’ the Day: Green Beer, by Rebecca Carter

Fosters Brewery To Develop Fuel Cell That Runs On Beer, by Michael dEstries

Photo Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/iantindale/79961379/