BRATTLEBORO — Last time out I was railing about green beer, the kind made out of lager and food coloring for St. Paddy's Day. But green beer, the kind that is environmentally conscious, is a different story.
I don't mean organic beer, although that is a topic worth investigating sooner rather than later. I mean beers produced by breweries doing all they can to lighten their carbon imprint.
Many breweries have long recycled spent grains to local farmers for use as feed. Others, such as Sierra Nevada Brewing Company from Chico, Calif., or Great Lakes Brewing of Cleveland, Ohio, are making innovative waste reduction efforts.
But few have a sustainability director, as does the New Belgium Brewery Company. I was lucky enough to visit the brewery last fall in Fort Collins, Colo., and came away duly impressed with both company and city.
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I was already a fan of the NBB beers, ever since I first tried one of the brewery's interpretations of a Belgian abbey ale, which basically tells the company story.
While biking in Belgium in 1985 Jeff Lebesch, an electrical engineer, had an epiphany about the glories and idiosyncratic flavors of Belgian beers. That led to his basement homebrewing efforts to replicate Belgian styles.
He married Kim Jordan, a social worker, who recounts that once they decided to go professional they formulated a four-part strategy: “To have fun, to make world-class beers, to proceed on a sound environmental basis, to promote good beer culture.”
The first year they sold a whopping 220 barrels of beer, which was almost Jeff's early goal, half hope, half prediction: “If we could sell only 60 cases a week, we can make it.” Sales leapt to 993 barrels in 1992, still leaving NBB as one of the most micro of microbreweries.
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Sixteen years later NBB was projecting 2007 sales of 485,000 barrels (or more than 124,000 cases a week), making it the third-largest craft brewer in the U.S., behind only the Boston Beer Company (Sam Adams), and Sierra Nevada.
It's been an exhilarating ascent into dizzying success, perhaps more remarkable in that NBB beers are distributed in only 17 mostly western states (alas). A joke floating around the company is how employees (now 300 strong) will be able to “ease up a bit when things slow down,” a time that has yet to come.
But no one is complaining. The company is a model of environmental stewardship, open-book management, and employee ownership, with a pervasive sense of fun.
The joke is that everyone wants a Fat Tire Amber Ale, the company's flagship beer, accounting for 70 percent of its sales. In the lively tasting room at the brewery's third incarnation just a few blocks from Fort Collins' revitalized downtown, filled with up to 500 gregarious visitors daily, a bucket filled with bicycle patch kits is labeled, “No one wants a flat tire - take one of these patch kits for free.”
The bicycle remains both a corporate metaphor and a real-life symbol of New Belgium. Jordan, now the CEO, still bikes to work, as does son Zak, a cellar operator at the brewery. (Jeff is still on the board but retired from day-to-day operations to return to his engineering impulses, including teaching a class in robotics.)
The brewery promotes biking in a variety of ways, including its Tour de Fat, a funky 12-city roving music and bike festival that raises funds for local bike groups. Every NBB employee receives a bicycle after a year (not to mention a tour of Belgium after five and a fruit tree planted in the brewery orchard after ten).
Indeed, it's sometimes hard to say what came first, the Fort Collins obsession with bicycles, or Fat Tire the beer. “It might have happened almost simultaneously,” said Cam Godecke of the Full Cycle bike shop, where visitors can rent bikes by the hour, day, or week. The city even has a full-time bikes coordinator, David “DK” Kemp, one of the few former employees of NBB (the company has a 93 percent employee retention rate).
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I stayed at the reclaimed, refurbished and refreshing Armstrong Hotel in the charming Old Town section of Fort Collins, a little over an hour north of Denver along the foothills of the Rockies, home to Colorado State University and a hotbed of hiking and biking trails along the Cache La Poudre River.
I borrowed a bike from the Armstrong's available fleet and followed what has become the main biking trail at dusk on late summer and fall Friday nights - right through Old Town to the New Belgium Brewery for the Bike-in Cinema night, another fund-raiser, offering riders the chance to watch films outdoors on an inflatable screen.
The atmosphere alone (and maybe a few NBB beers) helped boost Zoolander a notch, and once the film was over, being a part of the exiting pack of some 900 riders felt like participating in a latter-day Exodus.
Fun, indeed. But Jordan takes seriously the goal of using a successful business as a power for social good, and in conveying that goal to employees.
“A dedication to excellence and a loving atmosphere sets the foundation,” she says. “We've attracted like-minded people who share our core values about who we want to be.”
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“Thanks to Kim and Jeff, we have a DNA of sustainability,” Jennifer Orgolini, the company's sustainability director, said, noting that a cross-departmental group of employees met monthly to examine methods of weaving the concept throughout the company operations.
They did so in ways both small (recyclable corn-based plastic cups) and large (the employee-owners' vote to finance the company's move to wind power by dipping into their bonus pool).
NBB's laundry list of efforts to reduce its energy footprint could fill pages, from the use of more efficient brewing vessels, lighting from fluorescent bulbs and passive solar tubes, desks fashioned from old FedEx tubes, a brewhouse constructed from reclaimed timber, and even tasting room seats made from old bicycle rims.
The bonus is that efforts at sustainability can save money and add to the bottom line, although the payback is still a few years down the road for the major cogeneration initiative. One of the heaviest footprints in brewing comes from the wastewater used largely in cleaning bottles, barrels, and production tanks. Brewing efficiencies vary, but in the industry it has customarily taken five barrels of water to brew one barrel of beer.
“We have that down to a 3.9:1 ratio,” said Brandon Weaver, New Belgium's lead process water technician. “Our goal is to reduce it to 3.5:1.”
The onsite water treatment facility moves wastewater through a series of anaerobic and aerobic ponds, where bacteria munch away on the organic wastes, not only cleaning the wastewater but also producing methane at the same time. The gas is pumped back into the brewhouse, and produces about 15 percent of its electrical needs.
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Turning waste into a commodity is a good thing, although to the discerning beer drinker, it's what's in the pint glass that counts. If the brews concocted by NBB were mere belly wash, there wouldn't be much hullabaloo. But its regular lineup of beers is among the best in the craft-brewing industry, and its seasonal offerings let their hair down with imaginative ingredients - kaffir lime leaves, crushed coriander, goji berries.
Indeed, the limited 3,000-bottle release La Folie, a corked beer aged one to three years in wood barrels, is a tart, almost sour beer emulating the red ales of Flanders like Rodenbach. It's a beer certain to delight some, put off others, but it's clearly a beer that head brewer Peter Bouckaert is having fun with.
Spend some time with a bottle, and it may begin to suggest a beer that expresses just what love and excellence taste like.