A pint of the unusual? The search for a zero-waste beer

Making beer carries a fairly formidable environmental footprint, but craft brewers are taking up the challenge, using food waste and grey water to make sustainable ales

Have you ever pondered how sustainable your favourite beer is? No, I hadn’t either – until I started brewing. In truth – and it pains me to say it – the act of transforming barley into fermented beer carries an environmental footprint of pretty epic proportions.

To put it into perspective: average energy consumption is estimated to be about 0.2 kilowatt hours for each bottle of beer, enough energy to run a 40-inch TV for almost three-and-a-half hours. As for water, although it’s hard to quantify exactly how much is used to create beer – from the growing of hops and barley to the cleaning of brewing equipment – recent studies suggest it can take up to 300 litres of water to create just one litre of beer. Worse still, the majority of ingredients used to make beer are never actually consumed, with most leftover hops and malt earmarked for landfill.

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