Opt for Truly 'Green' Beer This St. Patrick's Day

Green-tinted beer is for the Irish-for-a-day crowd and those who don’t mind indulging in a little food coloring with their fermented beverages. Green beer, on the other hand, is for everybody, today and everyday. On this St. Patrick’s Day, Patch introduces you to some of the metro area's finest beer makers who double as eco warriors.

Choosing locally produced beer over national varieties is a green choice in itself, as the beverage logs fewer miles from brewery to your belly. Lucky us that we have a selection of tasty brews close to home. Luckier still that some of our local favorites have chosen to brew green. 

St. Paul-based heavy hitter Summit, founded in 1986 and is now available in 14 states, just released the latest in their Unchained Series, a Gold Sovereign Ale that uses organic floor malted barley. It was available in draught starting March 7and will be available in bottles beginning next week. Summit also uses regionally sourced barley for its lagers. Keeping it in the family, the North Dakota farm is owned by cousins of Summit founder Mark Stutrud.

Summit has taken steps in recent years to make its brewery greener as well. In partnership with Endres Processing, Summit turns its leftover diatomaceous earth (DE), protein, yeast and grain into poultry and swine feed. This keeps some 210,000 pounds of waste out of landfills each year.

Along with other eco changes like switching over to high-efficiency lighting, Summit recently introduced a water reclamation system that captures the water from the internal bottle rinser and then uses it for the external bottle rinsing operation. More sophisticated programming was also introduced to ensure that water usage matched bottle present conditions. These green updates dropped the rinsing water usage from a previous four gallons per case to 0.7 gallons per case. With a popular brew like Summit, this is a water savings of about 2.7 million gallons annually.   

Local nonprofit brew Finnegans contract brews with Summit. So what is true for Summit is true for Finnegans. Jacquie Berglund, president and cofounder of Finnegans, said the practice of running a charitable organization with beer (Finnegans donates 100 percent of its profits) is not necessarily eco-friendly but definitely community-friendly. 

Berglund also commented that Finnegans keeps things as green as possible out of its Minneapolis office.

“We’re very good on our recycling,” she said. 

Newcomer to the metro brewing scene Harriet Brewing is already making its mark environmentally. The microbrewery purchases about 75 percent of its malt locally from Rahr Malting Co. in Shakopee and another significant portion from Wisconsin. General Manager Pete Loeffler also confirmed the company’s plans to install solar panels on the brewery’s roof in May, which will cover about one-third of its electricity needs.

Fulton Beer is currently hard at work on their new brewery in the warehouse district of Minneapolis, which is slated to open this summer. Co-founder Brain Hoffman said the Fulton crew is taking care to ensure they are putting themselves in the position to take full advantage environmentally of the new space. For example, Fulton is also looking into the possibility of installing solar panels on the roof.

With the new location close to the Twins stadium and along the Cedar Lake bike path, Hoffman could confirm one thing. 

“There will be plenty of bike parking,” he said.

Are you the next Mark Stutrud? If you’ve got a killer homebrew operation taking over your garage, there are eco options for you as well. Juno Choi, head of retail stores for Northern Brewer, noted that responsible water usage is a central way homebrewers can be more eco-friendly.

“One of the main things a brewery does is it uses lots of water because there’s a lot of cleaning involved,” Choi said.

Homebrewers typically use water to cool beer down and the eco-friendly among them recycle that water by using it in their washing machines or to water plants. Choi also noted that, in an effort to reduce their carbon footprint, many homebrewers are choosing to get their hops from Forest Lake’s playfully named Hippity Hops Farm. 

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, beer lovers. Hippity hop over to your favorite watering hole and grab a yourself a green beer, with or without food coloring.