Hello BA, With all the news recently about the lead in Flint Michigan's water, I was wondering if any brewery's have been affected by this? If so, do any of these breweries have national distribution? Hoping some the MI folks could join in on the conversation. Figure I would put this in Beer Talk over a region specific forum due national distribution if there is any. Cheers!
I did a Google search of breweries in Flint; only two showed up. Neither Tenacity or Redwood have bottling, or national distribution. However, as a caveat, you should know that Flint is not the only city in the U.S.A. with a lead problem, nor is it the worst. There has just been more emphasis placed on it, mostly due to political reasons.
Yeah, like @BillHodson said, there's not much in Flint brewery-wise (or anything else). It's an old auto-industry city that hasn't caught up with the times. No quality beer from there, IMO. But also like Bill said, the lead problem is not the worst in the country. Just making news because mainstream media says so.
The question of water quality is interesting! Since mineral content and pH is a big deal to consistent brews, I would assume that most breweries are less susceptible to crappy water than most consumers, especially those in economically depressed cities like Flint. Also for the consumers
The only brewery in Flint proper is Tenacity. They have a report from an independent labs analysis on their Facebook page, saying none detected for lead. Some parts of the city do not have problems, other older parts with lead supply lines are where the lead is Very high. Redwood Lodge is in Mundy Twp, and is a brewpub. They would have been getting their water from the Detroit system. Redwood has won a bunch of awards over the years, and makes excellent beers to style. The styles they make may not be exciting to some, but I enjoy stopping there now and then.
I will also point out that no MI brewery is national, even the well known ones like Founders and Bells.
Any brewery worth their salt in going to be treating the water themselves whether is be via Reverse Osmosis/Distilling/UV ect the water. So Lead and coliform (which were really the main concerns with the Flint water) would not be an issue for the brewery.
Right. Some things can be removed by Granulated Activated Charcoal at low flow rates. Usually there are sedimant, GAC, RO and UV in series at the RO machines at grocery stores. Distillation is pretty expensive. Stone is an example of a brewery that uses RO filtration. That is to remove the minerals from the water, and they now are using about 60% RO as that area has depended more on Colorado river water, which is full of minerals. My local brewery is using a nano filtration unit. They can get down to about 20 ppm TDS with that, and it has less back flush waste than RO. The reason is that the water is so alkaline here, you can't brew many styles with it.
