Lagunitas will be last to can

Sodium hydroxide is also used to make pretzels, which go very well with beer. Handling it safely is not an impossible task.

I'm tired of pet eco-peeves. I hope Lagunitas has thought about the cradle-to-grave impacts of the rest of their brewing process in equivalent detail.

 

If that is the case, then i cant wait for Beatification in cans.

Start taking bets on what batch hits cans first? I think batch 7 will almost definitively be released in cans.

 

This isn't exactly news..

 

Handling it is pretty basic, really.

 

Never really been a fan of cans, though some good beers are available canned.

 

Is there a rimshot emoticon?

 

You're thinking of sodium chloride, not sodium hydroxide.

 

No--those delicious, mahogany pretzels (not the pallid, sweet ones) are dipped in a sodium hydroxide solution prior to baking. The German word for them, Laugenbrezel, literally means "lye pretzel."

 

Actually if you want a true "German" pretzel a nice cold bath is lye makes them perfect. A warm bath of Sodium Chloride works but not as well IMO.

 

Oooh yeah. Totally forgot about that.

 

Agreed - I'm pretty sure shipping beer across the entire country has a much bigger environmental impact.

 

Obviously everything has pros and cons, but glass is heavy and it still has to go somewhere (referencing the 50% recycling rate), so whatever. I don't mind cans. I don't understand why people don't like them. Pour it in a glass and it's the same, and out of a can isn't bad to drink. I'd rather drink out of a can than out of a bottle.

 

I understand what they are saying, there are a lot of environmental cost that are not mentioned in "green" products. When electric cars were first comping out I remember reading some articles about how the process to make the batteries for them make it less environmentally friendly to own one of those than an SUV.

In my senior design class in Material Science we looked at a couple of cases studies that proved opposite to come thinking. Such as paper bags are way worse for the environment than plastic bags, plastic cups are better than paper cups, and cloth diapers are about a push for disposable ones.

With all this said, I have not looked into the pros and cons about canning. However, if anything can be taken from what he said it is that we need to slow down and really think about the process before all running to this because someone said it is "green".

 

I work for a national plastics distributor and let me tell you. Its not that hard to handle chemicals if done properly.

Cheers!

 

I hope they don't fly much. Those airliners are mostly AL.

The process from Bauxite to AL is also very intensive on the electricity usage. Once you have the AL, it is easy to reheat and pour, making something new.

Electric cars are touted as zero emissions. That may be true for the car, but the electricity has to come from a power plant, unless you have some hydro, wind or solar in your area.

I don't mind cans. Kegs are just big cans to some extent (mostly Stainless these days).

 

Just so that you don't think I made up that quote, it's from coverage of this story here. OP ninja-edited it out from under me.

 

I love Lagunitas and can respect their stance, but if the environment was truly priority #1 then there would be no compact packaging or widespread distribution of any kind. They would promote small, local breweries with draft/growler-only beers and limit themselves accordingly.

 

I think what Lagunitas is pointing out is that, even if these chemicals are handled properly 99.999% of the time, 1 mistake in 10,000 it can still be disastrous - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajka_alumina_plant_accident

 

the issue isn't just proper handling, even if handling 100% properly, extracting and processing some materials are more hazardous to the environment than others (whether due to waste, mining requirements, processing cost, etc.)