Written by Abram on 23 March 2010
Hopworks owner Christian Ettinger monkeys around on the salvaged bike frames above the bar at Hopworks during the build-out phase.
Hopworks Urban Brewery celebrates its second anniversary on Wednesday, March 24 with $2 pints all day. The “eco-brewpub” as owner Christian Ettinger calls it produced 4500 barrels of certified organic beer in 2009, and is now distributing throughout Cascadia (Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia). The brewery took gold medals for its Organic Rise Up Red, and Organic Ace of Spades Imperial IPA (now on tap) at the 2009 Great American Beer Fest in Denver.
The brewpub, located in the Sunset Fuel building on 29th and SE Powell is family friendly, with a children’s play area. The building incorporates a number of eco-friendly elements. The Sunset Fuels offices were deconstructed and many of the materials were used to build the bar and booths, a cistern is used to collect rainwater for watering landscaping and washing down the parking lot, low or no-VOC finishes and paints were used in the construction of the pub. HUB uses biodiesel to fire its kettle, and hosts Bike-to-Beerfest, a celebration of bicycles and beer. This year the event will be held August 29th.
Christian Ettinger and HUB Assistant Brewmaster Ben Love at the Great Canadian Beer Festival in Victoria
Tags: Fests, Hopworks, organic, PDX
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Written by Abram on 16 March 2010
The Sierra Club just unveiled a new “how green is your beer?” quiz, for Paddy’s day with some good and somewhat surprising information. The glass bottle versus aluminum can item was particularly interesting, and something that I’ve suspected for a long time. (Take the quiz first, I don’t want to give it away.)
http://www.sierraclub.org/howgreen/beer/
Done… OK scroll down
Glass v. can- Shockingly the bottle takes less energy to produce. It is of course not a clear cut winner in the debate though. As an Oregonian I think recycling glass is normal. We’ve got the first bottle bill in the country, and most glass is recycled here (According to the Container Recycling Institute, in Oregon and 10 other deposit states 72.7% of glass carbonated beverage containers were recycled in 2006), but apparently most of America does not recycle glass (in states with no bottle bill only 12.4% were recycled). Glass is heavy and so shipping costs a lot and the raw materials are cheap. (I write about this problem and what several breweries around the country are doing to further glass recycling in my forthcoming Green Beer Report in Ale Street News but you’ll have to wait till that comes out to read about it.) Aluminum is much more expensive, and therefore more commonly actually makes a complete loop in the recycling stream. (Glass, even in some areas where collected for recycling often ends up being landfilled).
Then there’s the added weight of shipping glass, and the fact that refillable bottles are almost unheard of these days. Captured By Porches in St. Helens, Oregon recently introduced a refillable bottle. Owner Dylan Goldsmith is happy with the initial response, and has seen good return rates. The Bottle Pool in Canadian provinces is a good model for using returnable, refillable bottles. The program in Ontario has high rates of participation, (the Beer Store, which runs the program claims over 90% return rates, though Ontario craft brewers say that is not reflected in the amount of bottles that make it back to breweries). Even if we figure the rate of reuse at 75% that’s a huge savings in energy required to make new bottles. The average refillable bottle can be reused 8 times before it must be crushed and remade into glass. The challenge for breweries in North America is getting bottles back from far off markets. For Captured By Porches, this is not an issue as they have only local distribution.
Keep tuned to this section for a more in-depth look at the bottle vs. can debate. Happy Paddy’s day.
Tags: Ale Street News, Can vs. Bottle, Captured By Porches, organic, refillable bottle
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