Lazy 20-Something Guide to Sustainability

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The Lazy Twentysomething's Guide to Sustainability: Organic Beer

Organic - Not just for food anymore!

Apparently, Americans drink about 82L beer per capita every year. This places us 13th in the 2004 world rankings behind, well, most of western Europe. The Czech Republic and Ireland are first and second, with 157L and 131L, respectively. We may be woefully behind the rest of the developed world in beer consumption, but that hardly means that we should ignore how the ingredients are grown.

Beer is mostly water and malted grain (usually barley or wheat), with a little yeast for fermentation and hops for flavor. It takes about 336 square feet of barley to produce enough barley for one American’’s entire year of beer. The number of acres under barley cultivation worldwide is dwarfed by maize, wheat, and rice, but the rate of fertilizer per hectare is pretty high (pdf). The rationale for drinking organic beer over conventional is basically the same as with eating organic rather than conventional anything. Namely, a lower pesticide and synthetic fertilizer load in the environment and a lower pesticide load in you. Since “100% local” seems to be an impossibility for brewers outside of Germany, we’ll have to settle for USDA certified organic as our green alternative to conventional beer.

In an act of staggering generosity, members of the PRI Outreach and Development teams have tested a selection of organic beer in order to provide our readers with a little guidance should they wish to purchase some. We were able to find 3 brands of organic beer at the Finger Lakes Beverage Center*: Pinkus, Peak Organic, and Wolaver’s. A more thorough search would probably turn up an even greater variety. From Pinkus, we tried the Pils and the Munster Alt; from Peak Organic,we tried the IPA, the Pale Ale, the Amber Ale, and the Nut Brown; from Wolaver’s, we tried the IPA, the Pale Ale, the White Ale, the Brown Ale, and the Oatmeal Stout.

Here is a summary of the rankings and tasting notes, but the main point is that you don’t have to sacrifice taste to sustainability!


Peak Organic Amber Ale

• Darker
• Syrup-y
• Smells better than it tastes
• Unbalanced
• Awful start, but a good finish

Avg. = 5.375

Peak Organic IPA

• Righteous
• Smells like tomato plants
• Honey and citrus scents
• Darker than I thought it’d be
• Deeper than a hoppy finish
• I like the way it starts but it’s bitter at the finish

Avg. = 6.25

Wolaver’s IPA

• Cleaner than last IPA
• Don’t like his one as much – not as much character
• Floral and not too bitter

Avg. = 6.625

Peak Organic Nut Brown

• A little flat
• Smells better than the last one
• A little earthy
• Not a fan, generally, of nut brown ale
• Vanilla on the start
• Enjoys the complexity
• Brown-sugary sweet

Avg. = 7

Pinker's Original Unfiltered

• Yummy smell
• Smooth and not a big finish
• Summer beer
• Not too flavorful
• Citrus-y
• “…a decent Bud Light”

Avg. = 7.125

Wolaver’s White Ale

• Smells like bacon; like breakfast at CNC, like lighter fluid
• Citrus-y – more lemon than orange
• Needs citrus to be effective
• Sweet, and not smoky or salty
• Like the highest note on a piano
• Too complicated for a beer that you’d put citrus in

Avg. = 7.1875

Peak Organic Pale Ale

• Smells like soy sauce or the woods
• Coffee taste
• Acidic
• Herbal, earthen flavor

Avg. = 7.3125

Wolaver’s Oatmeal Stout

• “Oh, hello.”
• Smoky
• Delightful
• Tastes like dinner
• Not coffee, but espresso
• More earthy than other stouts
• “Starts sweet, then smoke, then coffee”
• It’s like chocolate that’s spent time by a campfire

Avg. = 7.3125

Wolaver’s Pale Ale

• Solid
• Definitely preferred
• Easy to drink
• Nice finish – not bitter
• Warm finish like a soup
• Bread-y

Avg. = 7.75

Wolaver’s Brown Ale

• Smells like a good beer
• Completely solid
• More than just nutty – Mr. Peanut Party Mix
• “tastes like beer to me”

Avg. = 7.83

Pinker’s Alt Beer Munster Ale

• Molasses and whiskey
• Bread-y – pumpernickel
• Mellowed out
• “I like this. I like this a lot.”
• Finishes with depth, and starts like OJ / juice
• Smells like grape juice
• You can drink this year-round, and all day
• Little too sweet overall

Avg. = 8.25


Have you tried any organic beer that we missed? How did you like it?



*Thanks to the Beverage Center staff for pointing us in the right direction.

The Lazy Twenty-Something's Guide to Sustainable Living - On Coffee

Ah, coffee. Without that delightfully bitter black kiss in the morning I fail to become a fully functional human being. Maybe it's an addiction. Maybe I once took a job as a barista for the endless supply of free drip coffee. Maybe when I consider remaining childless, a 9 month stretch without it weighs heavily in the argument. Whatever. I love it and I'm not going to stop drinking it for anything short of bleeding ulcers or pregnancy.

That said, the environmental (and social) impacts of coffee growth can be pretty horrific, and I can't really consider myself an environmentally conscious person without examining how drinking coffee affects the rest of the world. After all, I may be lazy, but I try not to be unethical. First, a brief note about choosing your battles in terms of green living, that I will try to expand coherently in another post. I am not a subsistence farmer who shuns all technology. You probably aren't either. We do things all the time that are less than ideal for the environment. We also make small compromises every day that are not really good for the environment, but just shift the pressure from one area to another. At this very moment I am typing this and listening to Sen. Lindsay Graham be slightly condescending to Elena Kagan on a computer. So: 1 machine running vs 2 (computer and tv). Rather than typing and distributing this on paper, it will be uploaded to a blog, so trees saved, but at the cost of the mining and manufacture of the laptops, desktops, and smart phones from which you all are reading and from which I am typing. I'm not in a hurry to move into a yurt and grow all my own food (lazy), but I'll buy sustainably grown food. I'm not in a hurry to give up coffee, but I try to buy coffee that lines up with my environmental and social views. So don't get discouraged and give up on the whole green thing because your carbon footprint can't squeeze behind the decimal. Mine doesn't, either. But I'm working on it.

Conventional wisdom says that coffee is the second only to oil as the most valuable traded commodity. While this might not actually be true, it's still a valuable traded commodity and plays an important role in the economy of many developing nations. There are several ways to buy coffee that have varying impacts on the farmers growing the coffee and make various statements about trade issues. This isn't that kind of blog, though, so I'm going to bite my tongue and stick with what I know: environmental impacts.

Coffee likes to grow in pretty specific conditions. Hawaii is the only state in the Union that grows it for export, in fact, because it is the only state that has the ideal high-elevation, dryish climate within a tropical environment that contributes to a constant average temperature of about 70 degrees. Coffee plants actually grow well in hotter, wetter lower elevations, because the warmer temperatures encourage the plants to fruit essentially all year. However, as any good coffee snob will tell you, this quantity over quality reproductive strategy produces beans with inferior taste. You can then counter that coffee snob's point by reminding them that the body and crema (tan foam on top, not milk) of the best espressos are achieved by a mixture of these inferior beans with the beans from the more highly regarded growing conditions. Most commercial coffee is from the warmer, wetter environment that encourages the production of more beans. Most of the higher-end coffee comes from the cooler, dryer, higher elevation, where, combined with relatively nutrient-poor soils, these conditions cause the fruit to grow more slowly, developing their flavors longer to produce some truly awesome coffee.

There are a few different strategies for growing coffee, each of which have varying impacts on the environment. As with most plants, more sun, more water, and more nutrients give higher yields. Conventional coffee farms clear-cut rain forest, irrigate diligently (New Scientist estimates that it takes up to 140L of water to produce 1 cup of coffee. This is more or less ok for Colombia, maybe not so much for Ethiopia), and fertilize their soils to achieve high yields. They run into the same problems that most conventional monocultures do. Just like sugar cane and corn farming in the rainforest, clear cutting and conventional fertilizers are bad for biodiversity and overall ecosystem health. They increase erosion, destroy habitat, and pollute surrounding soil and water with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Buying sun-grown coffee contributes to the destruction of the tropical rainforest in South America and water shortages in Ethiopia.

Contrasted with conventional methods is the traditional farming method of shade-grown coffee. There are a few different levels of shade-grown coffee. Reduced shade uses a single species of tree for shade, and typically provides between 10 and 30% cover for the coffee plants. While this is better than full sun farms, they still aren't great. Commercial polyculture deliberately introduces a few shade species that also are beneficial to soil chemistry and typically provides 30 - 60% shade cover for the coffee plants. Traditional polyculture introduces even more species of shade plants, and provides 60 - 90% shade cover. Rustic shade farms are basically coffee plants integrated into an existing forest, without removal of the native plants. These generally provide more than 70% shade, sometimes 100% shade. The more shade and plant diversity integrated into the farm, the fewer pesticides, fungicides, and fertilizers are generally required. Leaf drop from the shade trees and soil-chemistry-altering properties of the non-coffee plants reduce the need for soil enrichment, and generally allow for other food or cash crops to be grown along side the coffee. More and more types of plants reduce or eliminate appreciable soil erosion. The more shade cover and plant diversity in the area, the better the farms are for birds, insects, and other animals that lose habitat to conventional farming.

So how do you know what you're drinking? While you generally can't tell whether coffee was grown in commercial polyculture or traditional polyculture, some are identified broadly as shade-grown, but that is not a regulated term. There are a few organizations that rate or put their seal of approval on certain coffees for sustainable farming practices, including shade cover. The Rainforest Alliance and the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center both certify coffee that they feel meet their standards. There is coffee that is certified organic, a regulated term in the US. Unfortunately there were no low water use certifications that I could find, so I'm pretty sure that's just a necessary evil of coffee. You can find coffee that meets some pretty stringent ecological requirements. This is obviously not an exhaustive list. This might be.

How to make up for the extra money spent on environmentally friendly beans (not cheap)? Easy: make coffee at home (surprisingly lazy-friendly). Even if I spent $15/lb of coffee every week (I don't), I'd still be ahead of the game. Taking just the summer (when iced coffee reigns supreme) and just Gimme (because no one else here cold-brews their iced coffee), I'd still pay more than double to buy it in the shop. 16oz of iced coffee costs $2.25 at Gimme. My morning cup, cold-brewed from home, is 24 oz. That would cost about $3.37. Multiply that by 7 mornings in your typical week, and I'd be spending $23.59 if I didn't make it myself. Considering the only equipment you need for this is a mason jar and, if you're feeling industrious, filtered water, you can be buying some pretty expensive shade grown coffee and still saving money. In reality, a pound bag of beans will last me a bit over two weeks if I'm drinking around 24 oz a day. Sustainably produced, locally roasted coffee will run you $12 - $17/lb. If you aren't so picky about local roasters, you can get some great deals online and in grocery stores that meet the same environmental standards of production.

If coffee is one of your vices, consider paying attention to the kinds of beans you buy. I would also encourage you to look into some of the various fair trade certifications for coffee, but like I said, it's not that kind of blog.

The Lazy Twenty-Something's Guide to Sustainable Living - On CSAs

I thought this post was going to be about joining a CSA rather than container gardening, but it turns out it is going to be about both. I did not have Trish's rural upbringing. My only successful attempt at gardening was as a 6-year-old, when I planted (and harvested!) radishes under the careful supervision of my mother. While Mom comes from a family of truly talented gardeners, and has a green thumb herself, we never had an extensive garden. I grew up mostly in the North Western exurbs of Atlanta. Our house was built on Georgia red clay which is not much good for growing anything other than pine trees, bricks, and, surprisingly, azaleas. We did have a small garden that supported huge tomato plants and huge-er basil plants.

I am a convert to sustainable foods, rather than a cradle locavore. I never really thought about local or sustainable agriculture until I got to college. Metro Atlanta is very, very different from the Finger Lakes in terms of land use and attitudes. It's 5.5 million people in the worst kind of suburban sprawl. The instantaneous transition between urban space and farmland here still startles me. The Kennesaw grocery chains are not as conscientious about purchasing or providing local foods; there was no local farmer's market until very recently. Our only attempts at local or seasonal eating involved summer sweet corn and Georgia peaches. College coursework introduced me to food production and transportation issues, and I resolved to eat more sustainably once I was able to cook somewhere. Enter the CSA share.

The trick to doing these right (read: cheaply) is to split them with someone. Even if you don't, if you are already committed to sustainably farmed local produce, CSAs can be your most economical option. They're good for the farmers because they get a portion of their income up front, which helps with expenses at the beginning of the growing season. It's good for you because you are helping to ensure the success of local agriculture and because you get an entire season's worth of produce (in my case 24 weeks! 24!) for less than a month's rent. It works out to less than $20/ week for a huge amount of awesome produce. The catch is that it depends on your ability to write a sizable check up front. Several of the local CSAs have optional payment plans, but the price often goes up slightly. I like the 1-time full payment plan. It's like paying car insurance every 6 months instead of monthly; it saves you money in the long run.

A CSA share fits with the "lazy" in the blog title perfectly. I should point out here that my attempts at plant care have been abysmal since the radishes. In high school I managed to kill a small plant that is like a cactus, but needs less watering. I killed it dead. If it doesn't meow or bark at me for food, it won't get fed. Consequently, I am not confident in my ability to feed myself with a container garden. With a CSA, you get varied, seasonal produce and you don't have to grow it yourself. All you have to do is make a weekly trip up to the farm and bag it yourself. And oh, what a bag it is. There were at least 8 different kinds of salad greens this week. Stuff I haven't even heard of. So I got to happily munch on bok choi leaves and radishes for lunch today. Some super-spicy greens made it into my salad last night, and probably will tonight as well.

One of the more surprising things about this share was the seedlings that were up for grabs. I am determined to give gardening another shot because herbs are expensive. To that end, I already had basil started on the back deck. I took a second basil plant last week (because "enough" is rarely an apt modifier for basil) and 2 kinds of tomato seedlings. This week I took chives (for eggs!), rosemary (for bread!), and sage (what is it for?!). I grabbed discarded containers scattered around the back yard, bought some organic potting soil (about $2 more expensive than conventional), used some of the compost from our pile out back and remembered to water everyone once a day. All of the seedlings are miraculously still alive in containers on my deck. I promise to keep you updated on when (if?) the whole thing falls apart. As you can see, I am still not confident. Meanwhile, I will enjoy the organic, local, fruits (and vegetables) of someone else's labor.